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Rebecca Rebecca is offline
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Default A Better Solution?

Robert,

Yes, I'm using Acrobat 7.0 -- it came with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner (an
incredibly useful scanner, by the way). And yes, the file sizes are correct
because I sent them to myself by e-mail (I couldn't find your e-mail address
-- if you give it to me and I'll send you one with a lot of color pictures
[the whole book was scanned in color] , but please remember it was scanned
for my personal use -- I want to avoid copyright entanglements). Did I
stumble upon a method to save an enormous amount of disk space? Like you I
am still very dubious -- it's too good to be true. Such compression is
absolutely impossible, as you said, and maybe you will be able to find out
what's really going on. The original PDF was 154 megabytes, and the
resulting MS doc file is about 170 kbs. As you implied, such radical
compression would be insane. Please see if you can get to the bottom of this.

"Robert M. Franz (RMF)" wrote:

Hi Rebecca

Rebecca wrote:
Yes, Robert, the scanned book contains dozens and dozens of color pictures,
and yes, that's the actual size of the file. I know, at first I thought it
was a bug (say, my computer was not reading the file size correctly) or I was
losing my eyesight or my mind.


Wasn't thinking about a bug, but I've seen my share of 300 page (and
lots more) files in Word, and one file with 300 pages, esp. if it is a
converted thingy, is unbeleivable to be less than 30 KByte in size --
and that's w/o pictures! :-)


It does seem impossible (and I've been experimenting with various scanned
images for years to get the file sizes down). Try it out and you'll see.
It's almost a miracle (if you've got a ton of scanned material in PDF files,
that is). And frankly, navigating PDF files in Acrobat is a pain (slow as
molasses, despite some nice functions, though). But with a Tablet PC, you
can ink and do other thinks with the images in MS Word with no problem, and
it still does not increase the file size too much (though I haven't been
highlighting that much yet).


You are talking about the "full" Acrobat (not the Reader), right?
Haven't got that one any of the systems I'm working at these days,
unfortunately. But if the file is as small as you say it is, can you
send it to me for inspection? I'm _very_ dubious I must admit. Sheer
information theory would prohibit compression in the magnitude we're
discussion here (well, that's not quite right: you can compress the
whole Bible into 1 bit, but then the whole Bible text must be part of
the decompressing algorithm -- and I very much doubt Acrobat hacked the
Word executables ... ;-)).

Greetinx from good old Europe
Robert
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