PDF versus Tiff - Which Format is best for you ? Having decided to convert paper documents to electronic images you are faced with two very different ways to. Choosing the wrong format on which to base your Document Management System can be a catastrophe and once you are committed, then, going back is difficult if not impossible. Understand document characteristics and the pros and cons of PDF and TIFF based on indexing, search capability, security, a I think the question that I get asked more than any other is should we adopt Tiff or PDF as the basis for our electronic document storage? As you may have already guessed there is no simple, straight forward answer.
WHAT’S THE DIFF BETWEEN A JPEG AND A TIFF? The TIFF format works well with photos and graphics that have dot pat-. Slide Scanning Pros provides both TIFF and JPEG images to our customers for no extra charge (we can also do other formats on request for no charge). It depends upon what you want to do and with what type of document. To start with perhaps I should take a look at the two systems and then compare where each has it’s ups and it’s downs. PDF Documents. Introduced by Adobe PDF has become the most widely used format for all types of files from individual scanned pages to whole volumes of the thickest books ever. So what will it do for us? The great thing about it is that you can view it any system simply using the free Acrobat viewer so it wins hands down for cost effectiveness. As I said whole books can be stored in a single multipage PDF document and the chapters or sections can be separated by bookmarks wherever the writer wishes. Individual PDF’s ( by this I mean files) can be named with a title and searched for amongst large collections, of files, by this name. In addition there are Meta files available to the advanced search facility on acrobat viewer which, although intended for author and other information, can be used as search fields. This helps to get round one of the main difficulties of PDF which is its reliance on content searching. OCR and Content Search. One reason for the great popularity of PDF is that the scanned documents can be read and converted to a text version which then stays with the image or can be used separately. The text file can even be converted to a word document or even, if your lucky, to an excel spread sheet. There are a range of viewers that will enable you to view them but since the Microsoft imaging is no longer on every PC then there is no guarantee that when you send an image in this format that the recipient will be able to view it. Disadvantage number one. Tiff images are usually numbered i. In order to index them and search them you will need a document management software which will cost you from . Scanning Tiff Vs Pdf FilesSo why, you may well ask, does anyone want to use this image format with so much more going for PDF. PDF versus Tiff. In order to decide which is best for your application we need to take a close look at the type of documents that you want to store. We need to differentiate between the two types as below: Type 1. As an example say you wanted to be able to search for a specific document by either by Date, Surname, Order number or Date of birth of client and possibly a combination of several of these each would have to be in a specific field. If you try to put them all in the PDF title you can end up with huge long string which could even be longer than your operating system can deal with. In addition if you search by two parameters say date and name the search results will be equal to Date OR name you can not perform a date AND name search . Using Meta tags. Now it gets difficult. Each PDF has Meta tags available for author, Date. Title etc and these can be searched just like fields. It is not however straight forward. I will write an article about this later for those who want to try it out. Searching by Content. PDF. This enables you to search the content for any word ( or string of words ) and every occurrence of this will be shown to you. Scan documents to PDF, Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat scanning accepts images between 1. If you select Searchable Image or Clear. Scan for PDF Output Style, input resolution of 7. Also, input resolution higher than 6. To apply lossless compression to a scanned image, select one of these options under the Optimization Options in the Optimize Scanned PDF dialog box: CCITT Group 4 for monochrome images, or Lossless for color or grayscale images. If this image is appended to a PDF document, and you save the file using the Save option, the scanned image remains uncompressed. If you save the PDF using Save As, the scanned image may be compressed. For most pages, black- and- white scanning at 3. At 1. 50 dpi, OCR accuracy is slightly lower, and more font- recognition errors occur; at 4. If a page has many unrecognized words or small text (9 points or smaller), try scanning at higher resolution. Scan in black and white whenever possible. When Recognize Text Using OCR is disabled, full 1. For Adaptive Compression, 3. RGB input, or 6. 00 dpi for black- and- white input. Pages scanned in 2. Your system may require 5. MB of virtual memory or more to scan the image. At 6. 00 dpi, both scanning and processing typically are about four times slower than at 3. Avoid dithering or halftone scanner settings. These settings can improve the appearance of photographs, but they make it difficult to recognize text. For text printed on colored paper, try increasing the brightness and contrast by about 1. If your scanner has color- filtering capability, consider using a filter or lamp that drops out the background color. Or if the text isn’t crisp or drops out, try adjusting scanner contrast and brightness to clarify the scan. If your scanner has a manual brightness control, adjust it so that characters are clean and well formed. If characters are touching, use a higher (brighter) setting. If characters are separated, use a lower (darker) setting.
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