Best image format to use

[rstove02]

Have a friend that works at a company that has single page signed certificates on parts they ordered and need to keep a copy of them for over 7 years.

They are thinking of converting them to soft copy by scanning them and later viewing and printing them out on an as needed basis.

The format has to be good for text and signatures yet not take up huge space....(talking thousands upon thousands of images here).

They would do not want to have the run through a 3rd party compression format (rar, zip) after the image was created to get the image down to size...(in other words the image format is very efficient or has some type of built in compression).

Which format would be best....jpeg, gif, pdf, bitmap, etc?

 

[Homerboy]

.tiff or .jpg
we scan hundreds and hundreds of documents a day for the past 10+ years
all .tiff
while the meter is still counting after I did a properties on the dir.... 200,000 images 4GB and climbing

Edit: these are all legal documents so text and signatures and multiple pages.

above ALL you will want a document management system in place so you know WTF is what and where to find XYZ when you look for it (ours is built into our database itself, so I cant dreictly help you there, but there are lots of programs and companies that do this wonderfully).

 

[jtusa]

Originally posted by: Homerboy
.tiff or .jpg
we scan hundreds and hundreds of documents a day for the past 10+ years
all .tiff
while the meter is still counting after I did a properties on the dir.... 200,000 images 4GB and climbing

Edit: these are all legal documents so text and signatures and multiple pages.

above ALL you will want a document management system in place so you know WTF is what and where to find XYZ when you look for it (ours is built into our database itself, so I cant dreictly help you there, but there are lots of programs and companies that do this wonderfully).

Wouldn't PDFs be more useful for what you're doing? So they're searchable for text, just curious.

 

[rivan]

My vote is with PDF as well. If you want the lossless compression of .tif, you can set that up with PDFs - or you could use PDF's adaptive compression. The major advantage of PDF over .tifs - in my opinion anyway, is multi-page capability, which .tif does not support. Then there's all the additional capabilities, like being able to OCR the pages (which sometimes works great, sometimes not - it'll depend on your scans) and text search them. Then you could index all of the documents into a catalog and search that.

We have two of these where I work, and the document feeder and automatic scan-to-PDF turns a 200-page color document into a PDF in less than about 5 minutes - and black & white is even faster.

I think Xerox has less expensive B/W printers with the same scan-to-pdf capability, too, but I've got no direct experience with them. I'd also assume there are competitors to Xerox with similar stuff, but again... no direct experience with them.

 

[corkyg]

The new Acrobat 7.0 lets you scan documents directly into PDF format. That is really useful, IMHO. And, WordPerfect X3 will import PDF files directly now, and then same them as whatever you like.

I also vote for PDF. Second choice - TIFF.

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: rivan
The major advantage of PDF over .tifs - in my opinion anyway, is multi-page capability, which .tif does not support.

Yes it does.

Originally posted by: rivan
Then there's all the additional capabilities, like being able to OCR the pages (which sometimes works great, sometimes not - it'll depend on your scans) and text search them. Then you could index all of the documents into a catalog and search that.

You can do this with TIFFs as well.


Check out Atalasoft.com for demonstrations. TIFFs are the standard for what the OP is describing.

 

[corkyg]

Nothing wrong with both. TIFFs can have a much larger file size. They are in essence, a bit-mapped graphic.