Digital photo of a page to be viewed on mac and pc

In article , RPS
wrote:

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

Wouldn't scanning be better?

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed on
their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

PDF

--
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence.
-- Charles A. Beard

Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote:
I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed on
their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

Two things to keep in mind:

First, if you use JPG for file compression --- and you almost
certainly will, use a high quality setting. Otherwise it will be
hard to read the text.

Secondly, you probably need different files for viewing and for
printing. For viewing, assume 72dpi, which is to say, a file size of
about 612x792. For printing, you'll want at least 150 dpi, and
preferably 300 dpi, though the files will be so large that no one will
want to use them. In general, a graphics file is a bad way to give
someone something to print.

-Joel

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EXIF data for any image or web page: http://exif.posted-online.com
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I used to use OCR to convert scanned print into RTF, with which many
applications can print crisp documents from small files.

The US Patent Office uses TIFF at 300 dpi for many records. For an 8
megapixel page, their compressed TIFF was 136kB. Not all applications
can handle various TIFF compression schemes. Uncompressed TIFF was 1MB.
GIF was 260kB. Reasonably good JPG was 2.3MB.

RTF might be 5kB or so.

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:26:54 -0800, RPS wrote
(in article ):

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed on
their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

Thanks.

PDF is the only way to go. It is the most simple, everyone can read it, and
it doesn't change the way it looks from one computer to another. There are
plenty of utilities that will take an ordinary Word or similar document and
convert it to PDF.

Otherwise, JPG. Everyone has a JPG viewer. Obviously, someone who has a VGA
screen is going to want very low resolution, say, no more than 640 pixels on
a side. Don't worry about those folks. For a photo, I generally want to limit
it to 800 pixels on a side, but that would be too small for text. You want at
least 1020 pixels, but then it might not be easy to display on a single
screen, which gets us back to PDF, which can be easily re-sized for anybody's
viewing preference.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:20:59 -0800, C J Campbell
wrote:

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:26:54 -0800, RPS wrote
(in article ):

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed on
their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

Thanks.


There are plenty of utilities that will take an ordinary Word or similar document and
convert it to PDF.

Could you name a couple, please. I have had trrouble finding one that
works consistently.

Thanks

ZnU wrote:
In article , RPS
wrote:

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text).

You'd really be much better off using a scanner.

The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several people
who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed
on their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want?

PDF, ideally. Basically everyone can also open GIF and JPEG files, but
it'll be more work for the people printing them to get them to fill
(but not spill over) a single page.

Mais il est fou lui C'est une image, pas besoin d'avoir un fichier PDF
lourdingue pour ça. JPG, BMP, GIF ou autre format quasi-universel fera
parfaitement l'affaire

John of Aix wrote:

Whoops, in French again.

I was saying that PDF is for nutcases. A simple JPG, BMP, GIF or any
other quasi-universal file will be perfectly OK

Ken Lucke wrote:
In article , RPS
wrote:

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

Wouldn't scanning be better?

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed
on their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

PDF

PDF requires something to convert to PDFwhich is not native to a basic
PC, en top of that for what it doezs (we're talking one page here) it
incredibly heavy (Kb wise) and generally, in my opinion, PDF is crap and
a waste of time. I have never yet seen a file that couldn't be handled
just as well as Word document or similar.

C J Campbell wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:26:54 -0800, RPS wrote
(in article ):

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size, mostly
text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted among several
people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed
on their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

Thanks.

PDF is the only way to go. It is the most simple, everyone can read
it, and it doesn't change the way it looks from one computer to
another.

It also requires third party software and for that is not the best
choice for anyone. A simple image of good quality will do fine in the
case under discussion.

Bill wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:20:59 -0800, C J Campbell
wrote:

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:26:54 -0800, RPS wrote
(in article ):

I have to take a digital photograph of a page (US letter size,
mostly text). The resulting computer file would be distrubuted
among several people who for viewing and printing on both Macs and
PC's.

I do not have any way to know who will have what software installed
on their computer, so I must assume a basic generic setup.

With that in mind, (1) What format do I want? (2) What size the file
should be in pixels, for it to be viewed comfortably on screen and
printed?

Thanks.


There are plenty of utilities that will take an ordinary Word or
similar document and convert it to PDF.

Could you name a couple, please. I have had trrouble finding one that
works consistently.

Exactly. It requires third party software or add-ons, images do not. You
have a picture to send, not a picture and readable and modifiable text
to send. It is therefore completely useless to change it into a very
heavy format such as PDF which will not only make its display ugly
(because read in Acrobat Reader) but will print no better. Send a good
quality image and that will do.

In article , John of Aix
wrote:

John of Aix wrote:

Whoops, in French again.

I was saying that PDF is for nutcases. A simple JPG, BMP, GIF or any
other quasi-universal file will be perfectly OK



"Portable Document Format" files, a file format specifically and
intentionally designed to be capable of being read by freely available
(and free of charge) readers on virtually every graphics-screen capable
computer known to mankind, aren't "quasi-universal"?

OK.

::sigh:: There goes another illusion....

--
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence.
-- Charles A. Beard