Marcelo.

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Jan Böcker <jan.boecker@jboecker.de> wrote:

On 11/05/2011 09:03 PM, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I just bought a scanner and started to scan important documents as a
> backup, and archiving them with meaningful metadata in orgmode files.
> Then a question came to mind - what dpi to use? I'm not really savvy
> when it comes to scanning or printing, and I want like a dpi that allows
> me to reprint the document at an acceptable quality later if necessary,
> but that also doesn't take that much space (600dpi pdfs take around 5MB).

Hi Marcelo,

I am using 300 dpi. Even the fine print on my cell phone contract is
still comfortably readable at this resolution.
I guess that about 150 dpi is sufficient for most documents, but I don't
bother thinking about that on a case-by-case basis and just scan
everything at 300 dpi.

I do scan most documents in grayscale and only enable color when required.

Said cell phone contract weighs in at 4.6 MiB for a 6-page grayscale PDF
(about 770 KiB per page).

Btw, my problem with big file sizes it not exactly disk space (which
rapidly becomes cheaper with time) but the time it takes evince to
display the document on my laptop :)

If you are interested in the shell script I use to scan to PDF files,
see
http://www.jboecker.de/2010/04/14/general-reference-filing-with-org-mode.html#sec-5

Hope this helps,
Jan