How do you encode your paper scans? - eviltoast

I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.

How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels (“dirty” artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don’t go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren’t possible (at least not in Paperless).

Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756

  • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    And how do you encode the images of the scan contained in the PDF/A? That’s the crux here.

    • lemming007@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure I understand. I just scan anything and let my software spit out PDF/A

      • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        PDF/A is not an image format. As a document, it may contain images.

        • lemming007@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          My PDF/A documents contain all kinds of content, including text and images. To me, it doesn’t matter what format the encoded images are, as long as I can open them 20 years from now. Why would one care one way or another?

          • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I care that the text remains readable (both to me and also software) and that I don’t balloon my storage out of control.

            JPEG (even at higher levels) subjectively degrades text in particular to a degree that I worry about the former and PNG makes me worry about the latter.

            My current plan is to go with the latter since storage is a relatively cheap issue to fix while data loss is pretty much permanent.