Scanning docs

[Dan Gendreau]

> I've to correct you. TIFF compression is used everyday, all over
> the world.
> Namely fax documents are encoded this way, before being sent. And it not
> LZW, it's Huffman coding. The code table is fixed, while LZW
> makes a new one
> for each job.
> I know this because I'm current working on a fax project. (Argh,
> 8051 doing
> Huffman compression)
>
> JJ

Um, I have to "me too" here as well...

I work in the document scanning/archiving industry and TIFF format is
specifically designed for compressing black and white documents and
reproducing them again. It is not an obscure printer specific format as you
suggest.

GIF is nice and probably easier for people to view, but I am fairly certain
Group-4 TIFF format has better compression for these types of scanned
images. At 300DPI, most scanned pages are ~40kb. The software that comes
with most scanners can produce Group4 TIFFs and most shareware image
viewers/editors support the format.

PDF is probably the easiest format to distribute documents in since it
packages all the pages together, but If you are like me and you like to
edit/manually clean up scanned schematics then PDF is a big pain in the ass
because it will not allow you to extract the images back out.

Just my $0.02,
-Dan G.