Legally scanning my documents

tocsin

I can see both points of view...

Suspect that the work-based police use is specifying maximum fidelity at the cost of much increased file sizes, because it is _likely_ to be used in court.

For day to day use, I'm scanning my home stuff to OCR'd PDFs - the original image appears "over" the OCR. This means a human sees the original image, but the computer can search the content.

As it happens, the software I use (ABBY FineReader) stores work in progress as TIFF. These are about 20-25Mb per page, and the final PDFs are 500K to 1Mb a page, depending on content.

Hope that helps!

tocsin

Oh, forgot to add that the same company (ABBYY) are offering a PDF management program - e.g. merging PDFs - which I'll probably be trying out as well (just a customer!)

prowla

Scanning into PDF is going to give you the most portable form.

Some photocopiers let you scan onto a USB memory stick and you can use the document feeder and double-sided features to speed things up.

If you scan into raw TIFF then you can save space by storing them in a compressed folder or ZIP archive (which some OSes treat as a folder anyway).

Lum

Or make sure to use TIFFs with LZW compression which is almost the same thing as .ZIP anyway.

TIFF is only huge if you don't bother with a compressed TIFF

s4lvatore

Sorry for the delay in replying been real busy.

So what we are saying here is PDF are the most practical, and should be fine for anything civil right?

As far as criminal stuff goes, well I hope never to be involved in that so lets not really go there.