Automatic and manual optimization
All the optimization functions may be added to the automated scanning process or they can be performed manually on selected pages and documents.
Optimization of scanned documents
Why is optimizing scanned documents important? Document scanners deliver images of the pages in a document. Cleaning up and enhancing those images before the file is stored is an important part of any document capture system. Benefits of adding image enhancement to the document scanning workflow are:
- Better readability and visual appearance of the stored documents
- Reduce risk of losing information from the original
- Less storage space required due to better image compression
- Improved accuracy of text recognition (OCR)
Document optimization capabilities
The most common cleanup operations needing to be done after the document has been scanned are:
- Detect page sizes and orientation
- Remove black borders and punch holes
- Remove blank pages
- Deskew (straighten) pages that were skewed by the scanner's sheet feeder
- Remove spots (speckle) caused by dust and stains on the original
Sometimes it is also desirable to enhance the scanned images, for example if the originals are very dark, dull, unsharp, have a color cast, etc. Some document scanners may even introduce such unwanted effects during scanning. By adding image enhancement to the scan processing, you can to some degree compensate for this.
- Automatically enhance or adjust contrast
- Adjust brightness
- Adjust color balance
- Sharpen
These functions greatly increase efficiency of document Scanning:
- Detecting page sizes and blank pages
This enables you to scan a mixture of page sizes and single-sided or double-sided without having to manually crop pages and remove blank back sides afterwards - Detecting page orientation
This can save scanner operators a lot of time. They no longer have to browse the entire batch to make sure every page is oriented correctly, before they scan it - Booklets
The easiest way to scan a booklet to PDF is usually to just remove the stitches and put it in the sheet feeder of your document scanner. But the file you get from the scanner isn't very user friendly. You'll be browsing through double pages in a very confusing order. You could of course cut the booklet along the fold with a knife and rescan, but then you would destroy the original.PixEdit's automatic booklet function helps you with this problem. It will automatically cut the pages digitally and rearrange them into correct reading order.
When scanning thousands of documents, file size is a very important concern. Producing many large files can take up a lot of harddisk space and network bandwidth and make your production scanning a lot more costly. However, when cutting down on file size, it is crucial to retain the image quality and readability of documents. PixEdit® has two unique and powerful features to help you with this.
- ACRO™ - Automatic Color and Resolution Optimization
This technology exploits the fact that, in most cases, a large document consists of only a few pages with color images on them and many pages with just black-and-white text. If you scan the whole document in full color, you will get a huge file. However, if you run it through the ACRO function, all pages with little or no color content will be converted to black-and-white. And black-and-white images takes up roughly one-twentieth of hard disk space compared to full color images! - PDF Compact
In cases where you have some color content that must be preserved on a major part of a large document, this technology is a better solution than ACRO. It will reduce the number of colors on each page so that they can be compressed much more than the images that came from the scanner. This also reduces the file size many times and can save a lot of space and network load.
