I have a 39-page color brochure (A4) and a four-page magazine article (standard size) I'd like to scan for both personal archival as well as public web purposes. I'm thinking primarily screen viewing for the latter, and mostly screen, but perhaps printable for the former.

What are the suggested settings and file formats for each purpose? Or, rather, what are the best "commonly acceptable" settings to use to keep the file sizes to a minimum, but reasonable quality standard?

Thus far, I've played around with 300dpi multi-page TIFFs. The magazine article is manageable, but the brochure consumes more than the space of a CD-ROM.

300dpi is the least I'd do for archival purposes.

Are you using LZW compression on the TIFF files?

It's lossless, and given the typical whitespace one sees in magazines and brochures it should save a considerable amount of drive-space.

Got it, thanks. Just wanted to avoid a novice mistake like pegged VU meters when setting a recording level.

The scanning app I initially used had a compression setting that apparently is buggy, or works intermittently, so I switched to a different one, and the files sizes are much smaller.

I'm OK with the size of the "master" TIFF files, but I'm finding that in converting them to PDF for web consumption, the resolution has to be halved to get any sort of reasonable file sizes. I guess that's the nature of a PDF comprised of a lot of scanned images, but I'm wondering if there's anything further that can be done.

Its hard to "compress" pixels as a PDF.

If you had a page layout app I would recommend saving your images as high quality jpegs, placing into said app and then try making screen ready PDFs.

might make it smaller, might not.

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