Suggestion for Graphic prog - best compression available

  • Thread starter Thread starter BT
  • Start date Start date
B

BT

Hi all,
I travel quite a lot and need to take a few reference books along.
They do take up space. I was thinking of scanning them and then
burning
the scans to a disc(s). Is that the best way?
The question is what prog would you suggest that will compress the
graphic files the most. What type of file it is, I am not bothered
about, just something that will get the files onto a disc or two.
I don't need something with a load of 'bells and whistles' just
something I can access to see the various pages easily.

TIA

Andy
 
BT said:
Hi all,
...a few reference books...I was thinking of scanning them and then burning
the scans to a disc(s). Is that the best way?
Click to expand...
....what prog would you suggest that will compress the
graphic files the most.
Click to expand...

Andy;

Tell me if I have this right: You travel, usually carrying a few
reference books along. You'd like to scan them onto discs.

Before I even answer your actual question, let me ask a few:

1) have you checked whether these reference books are available already
in soft format (eg Gutenburg Project)?

2) are you willing to look for similar books which are?

3) have you considered OCR as opposed to simple image scans?

The reason I bring this up is that scanning a traditionally-bound book
is going to be a royal...<ahem>...PITA.

-Craig
 
Craig presented the following explanation :
...what prog would you suggest that will compress the

Andy;

Tell me if I have this right: You travel, usually carrying a few reference
books along. You'd like to scan them onto discs.

Before I even answer your actual question, let me ask a few:

1) have you checked whether these reference books are available already in
soft format (eg Gutenburg Project)?

2) are you willing to look for similar books which are?

3) have you considered OCR as opposed to simple image scans?

The reason I bring this up is that scanning a traditionally-bound book is
going to be a royal...<ahem>...PITA.

-Craig
Click to expand...
Hi Craig,
No, they are not readily available. They are of minor interest,
essentially specific law type books tending to deal with Tenders /
Contracts. I use them as reference material. They also contain legal
type forms with odd size boxes, so OCR I think would be a time
consuming nightmare.
regards
Andy.
 
BT said:
Craig presented the following explanation :


Hi Craig,
No, they are not readily available. They are of minor interest,
essentially specific law type books tending to deal with Tenders /
Contracts. I use them as reference material. They also contain legal
type forms with odd size boxes, so OCR I think would be a time consuming
nightmare.
regards
Andy.
Click to expand...
Andy;

There are a lot of freeware s/w scanners the ones I'm familiar with are
bundled w/image editing proggies: (irfanview & GIMP). If you're going
to read the scanned files using your computer, it's a tad easier to
simply keep the scanned pages on your hard disk instead of burning them
to discs but...<shrug>

Wrt compressing graphics, I'd imagine the .jpg format would do nicely.

hth,
Craig
irfanview: http://www.irfanview.net/
The GIMP: http://www.gimp.org
 
Craig presented the following explanation :
Hi Craig,
No, they are not readily available. They are of minor interest,
essentially specific law type books tending to deal with Tenders /
Contracts. I use them as reference material. They also contain legal
type forms with odd size boxes, so OCR I think would be a time
consuming nightmare.
regards
Andy.
Click to expand...

I would try ECW format. Files are smaller than JPG with the same
quality. At least this is true for aerial photographs. Irfanview can
handle these with it's plugin bundle, so can Photoshop with a plugin.
There is a free program from ER Mapper that converts files from other
formats to ECW.
Another option is JPEG2000 or JP2. It's a newer better type of JPG.
Irfanview can handle these also.
 
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