The Quick Guide to Electronic Delivery: From Paper to PDF

By Sylvia Merino, MBA, MPH
Head, Learning Resources Division
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

Have you ever wished you had the right equipment on your desktop to turn a paper article into electronic format? There are several distinct advantages to emailing interlibrary loan articles in electronic format. Emailing the article as an attachment will save time and expense in stapling, stuffing paper into an envelope, addressing the envelope, putting the envelope in the outgoing mail — and all this just from the sending end.

There's the old standby, the fax machine, one of our first methods for turning paper into a digital transmission. Don't knock the fax, it's probably easier to operate a fax machine than a computer and scanner. But everyone seems to have an Internet connected computer in front of him or her these days, and it's only natural to think of sending some sort of email attachment instead of faxing. PDF, Portable Document Format, is a commonly used format for electronic documents, and a first choice for electronic delivery.

Should you consider sending some of your articles as scanned PDF email attachments? I think you should base that decision on whether your clients will feel that they are receiving better service with a PDF. Do your clients have strong requirements for speedy delivery? Do all your clients have easy access to email? Do they have severe email attachment size limits that would preclude sending large PDF files? The most important fact for you to remember about scanning PDF files is this: going from paper to PDF entails creating an image of the pages. Images are always bigger files than word processing documents, like a Word document. That's because each and every one of the numerous pixels that comprise an image needs to be "described" or coded whereas only a small number of characters on a page needs to be "described" in a document. You can scan in paper articles that are mostly text or text with line-art graphics (tables, line graphs) and keep the PDF file size relatively small. But you will probably never be satisfied with the results you obtain scanning in paper articles that are text mixed with many photographic images (gray-scale or color photos). If you scan these properly so that the images are recognizable, the PDF files will be too large, especially if there are more than a handful of pages to the article.

Having said that, if your clients really need their articles delivered yesterday and they only need the text to be readable, you have the ideal situation for creating a PDF. PDF is an ideal format for document sharing because of the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader. Because the Reader is available at no charge, anyone can (theoretically) read a PDF document. And, if you buy Adobe Acrobat for ILL you may find other uses too — since you will be able to create PDF files from the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop and other documents that you create in your daily work. You can even use Adobe Acrobat to capture entire web sites to PDF with working hyperlinks. This could be very handy for archiving web information for research or off-line demonstration.

So, just what do you need to make your own PDF? Basically, just three things:

a computer
a flatbed scanner
the Adobe Acrobat software for making (not just reading) PDF files

We will assume that you already have an adequate computer at your workplace. For the other two items, you most likely will have to contact your institution's IT department for their help in selecting and purchasing new equipment and software for your workplace. This is always a good practice. Your IT department should know if your institution has any preferential licensing agreements in place for certain software and hardware. And there are always important technical criteria to consider in the selection process which your IT department should walk you through. Here are some points to consider:

Scanners

Quality — You will need a high quality scanner if you intend to scan photographic images, which require a higher bit capability to capture high-resolution images and vibrant colors. But for plain everyday scanning, which is mainly text mixed with some graphics, you will be okay with a cheaper scanner in the $70 to $200 range.
Features — You may want to purchase a scanner that comes with a document feeder if you anticipate doing a lot of batch scanning of loose papers.
Connection — Do you go with USB versus Parallel? This depends on what operating system is on your computer. USB will only work on the following Windows systems: 98, 2000, ME, XP. You cannot connect a USB device to a computer running the Windows 95 or NT operating system. And please note that if you purchase an older model scanner that it must come with compatible drivers for the computer you intend to attach it to. This can be a problem if the model is two years old and thus shipped only with drivers for 98/ME and the company didn't update the drivers for their older scanners. On the Mac side, if you have a model that is 3 years old or less, you probably can use USB and possibly can use a faster Firewire type of scanner. Firewire is much faster, but a Firewire scanner will cost quite a bit more.
Brand — Your IT department may have strong preferences for certain scanners, depending on their experience. I prefer to install name brand devices, especially HP for scanners and printers. HP is known for good driver compatibility with Windows and Mac operating systems. And HP usually doesn't "abandon" their old product lines; they continuously update drivers so that old but still usable equipment can be attached to computers with the latest operating systems.

Adobe Software

Version — Remember, you can't make PDF files with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader! But don't worry, you don't have to buy the more expensive version in the Adobe product line. Do not buy Capture ($650) and Distiller Server ($4 to $5k) as these are much more than you need. You want the latest version of the standalone software: Adobe Acrobat 5.0 ($250).
Cost — There are educational discounts for all Adobe software, including Acrobat. Currently, the educational price can be as little as $58. If you are allied with a university and your IT department is unaware of the educational prices, check out some of the educational web sites. You can find a list of them at: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Retailers/Discount/
Mac — I have read that the latest version of the Mac operating system, Mac OS X, has 2-D imaging software called "Quartz" built into the operating system. Quartz is based on Adobe's standard for PDF so X-native programs can print to PDF without the additional purchase and installation of Acrobat. I don't believe there is an X-native imaging program out yet, including Photoshop. For the time being, you still have to purchase Adobe Acrobat to turn scanned paper into PDF files on the Mac.

Your IT department should handle the installation process for you. In particular, the Adobe Acrobat software should be installed by someone logged in to the computer with "local admin" rights. In most organizations, this usually means that a normal user can't successfully do the installation. Also, I would recommend doing the installation in this order: any applications first (Word, Excel, etc), then Adobe Acrobat, then lastly the scanner.

Why install in this order? When you install Acrobat, it will automatically add the components Distiller and PDFwriter to the system so that all authoring applications (Word, Excel, etc) will thereafter have these two new "printers" available via the PRINT command. Then, when you install your new scanner with the software and drivers that come included with it, the install process will detect all the "scanner capable" programs that are already on your computer and add the components that allow these programs to operate with the scanner.

Now that you have your scanner and software ready, what do you do to get from paper to PDF?

Scanning

Here are the steps that I would use to scan a 2-page article that consists mainly of text but has some small photographs (face shots) mixed with the text.

Put page one of the article face down on the scanner bed aligned against the upper left or right corner (look for a graphic icon at the glass top of the scanner that indicates how to align the document on the glass).
Launch the Adobe Acrobat 5.0 program.
On the menu bar, go to File > Import > Scan.
This will launch the "Acrobat Scan Plug-In" dialog box.
In the dialog, under "Devices" choose your scanner (what you'll see is the name of the scanner software, "HP PrecisionScan," not the actual name of your scanner, "HP 4300cse")
In the dialog, under "Format" choose single-sided or double-sided, depending on whether the original is single-sided or double-sided.
In the dialog, under "Destination" choose "Open New PDF Document."
At the bottom of the dialog box, click on the "Scan" button.

This will open up the scanner software for your particular scanner. When you installed your scanner software and drivers, you installed a proprietary program that was designed by the manufacturer specifically for your scanner. These programs vary, but they usually have scanner settings for you to configure on the left side of the window and a graphical representation of the scanned image on the right side.

The following steps are for the HP PrecisionScan software. Your software may vary.

In the section, "Where do you want the scan to go?" set it to "Adobe Acrobat Scan."
In the "Output Type" or "Type of Image" section, you will see various choices. In order of increasing resolution and file size, they are:
- Black and white drawing — smallest file size, good for all text and line-art
- Black and white photograph — good gray-scale images, large file size
- Normal color photograph (256 colors) — good color photos, large file size
- Best color photograph (16 million colors) — absolutely huge file sizes
  For the smallest file size, always choose B/W Drawing. However, if the article includes pictures that absolutely must be clear, you should choose B/W photograph.
In the "Output size" section, you will see various choices:
- Use original size
- Scale size by percentage
- Specify custom
  For an article that has a uniform 8.5" x 11" size, just choose "Use original size."
Most scanner software will allow you to play around with the settings on the left and view the resulting changes in the image quality on the right side of the window. Make sure the settings you have chosen will produce a readable text.
Click on "Scan" or something similar, "Send the scan now."
Depending on the speed of the scanner, you may have to wait some time for the scan to take place.
A small "Acrobat Scan Plug-in" dialog box will pop up. If you have another page to scan (page 2 of the article) put it face down on the scanner bed and click on the "Next" button.
Your scanner's proprietary software will again open, showing the scan of page 2.
Reapply the same settings you used in steps 9 through 12 and click on "Scan."
The "Acrobat Scan Plug-in" dialog box will pop up again.
Since we don't have a page 3 to scan, we will click on the "Done" button.
The software will now transfer the scans into Adobe Acrobat and the program will open with the image of your two pages in the right pane. You may need to crop white borders around the scan.
Go to Document > Crop Pages
Put a checkmark in "Remove white margins," select page range of "All," and click the "OK" button.
When asked, "Are you sure you want to crop all pages?" answer "Yes." For most articles, this type of quick cropping should work fine.
To save the PDF, go to File > Save As. Make sure you give the PDF a descriptive name and save it somewhere on your hard drive where you can find it again.

My test scan of a two-page article that is mainly text but includes a photograph produces a file that is only 301 kb in size if scanned as B/W Drawing. All the text is readable but the photograph of the man's face is very dark and unrecognizable. When scanned as B/W Photograph the size increases to 5,500 KB (5 Mb) but I can read the text and also recognize the face of the man featured in the article.

It's relatively easy to scan paper into PDF format, but the eternal question is one of balancing image quality against file size. How do others create those small, beautiful PDF files you see on the web? Most of these PDFs were not created with a scanner; they were "born digital" and made with Word, Pagemaker, or another publishing application.

If you are willing to look into another trick, download the free Adobe Paper Capture plug-in for Acrobat Windows. Be sure to download the instructions as well. This plug-in is essentially an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) plug-in that will capture the text of an article as actual text, not image, and create an editable PDF. An OCR program can decrease the file size by capturing scan into a document with the article's text as text and the graphical elements as the larger image format. The Adobe Paper Capture plug-in can theoretically do this, but I'm afraid that it's an "OCR lite" program and only works with ideal original documents with very clean standard typeface.

You might want to investigate purchasing and using a real OCR package such as OmniPage Pro. And if you have Photoshop, you may want to scan your paper into a real image format, such as TIFF. These are very large image files, but you can then embed the TIFF images into the pages of a Postscript document and use the Acrobat Distiller (one of the components of Adobe Acrobat) to convert the Postscript file to PDF. Because you can control compression settings with Distiller, you can learn to create smaller PDF file sizes, albeit with extra work.

Lastly, try scanning some of your typical articles to see what image quality and file size you can obtain. You may find that most of your ILL articles are in fact text and line-art and look fine scanned as a black and white drawing. If one page of the article has a graphic on it and scans badly, you can scan just the one page as black and white photograph. The total file size for the PDF jumps up a bit, but at least the quality of all the pages is acceptable. With experience, you may be able to deliver very good PDF files to some of your more demanding clients.

[Editor's Note: More information about document delivery is available on the NN/LM page Electronic Document Delivery, http://nnlm.gov/libinfo/docline/edd.html. This is linked from the PSRML page: Services for Network Libraries -> Document Delivery -> Electronic Document Delivery.]

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The Quick Guide to Electronic Delivery: From Paper to PDF

By Sylvia Merino, MBA, MPH Head, Learning Resources Division UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

Scanners

Adobe Software

Scanning

By Sylvia Merino, MBA, MPH
Head, Learning Resources Division
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library