Scanning paper files

Want to reclaim office space and reduce storage costs? Improve customer service and response times with instantly accessible records? Survive compliance audits and better protect data by enforcing your policies and business rules? Then you need to remove your biggest obstacle—paper. No one knows how to do that better than Docufree.

We process documents for some of the most highly regulated and demanding organizations across the country every day, turning their paper documents into digital images and data that are instantly available to their people, workflows and systems.

Managing a large-scale document scanning project on your own can be needlessly complicated, time-consuming and expensive. At Docufree, we make it easy. Get all the services, software, and support you need to turn any size document scanning project around quickly and accurately at a cost you can afford. All you have to do is place your files in a Docufree box. Scanning is only the first step. We also name each document and extract the information you need based on your business requirements—making your documents more functional, better organized, and easier to search and find.

Get immediate access to your digital images and data with ScanCloud. Use our secure platform to review and organize images and indexes, track the status of your scanning project, request file pulls, as well as capture documents on your own from a scanner, multifunction device, business application or network folder.

Plus, ScanCloud makes it easy to securely share and export your images and data to other people, workflows and systems. Actually doing it is a tricky proposition. Scanning can be a complex process that requires solid hardware, plenty of storage either offline or online , and no small amount of personal dedication.

Reviewing scanners is outside the scope of this story, but PCWorld has fortunately done that heavy lifting for you. Be sure, as you page through the reviews, that you consider only devices that include a sheet feeder and a duplexer. The best intentions to reduce paper have been torpedoed by having to place originals on a flatbed scanner one at a time or dealing with discombobulated scans with their pages out of order.

But when those pages start to surpass 50 or 60, the time savings offered by a faster scanner can really add up. Physical documents can easily be digitized, offering you numerous advantages. A multi-functional device MFD produces good quality digitized documents, but it requires some effort on your part.

If you already have such a device, it should feature a built-in scanner with which you can digitize paper documents. However, even if your MFD can be sheet-fed automatically, this is still a rather time-consuming method of digitizing paper documents. If you have a large number of papers that need to be scanned, this method may take quite a while. Multi-function devices also tend to jam from time to time, which can lead to a lot of frustration and wasted time.

Generally, this approach should only be used if you have an MFD into which paper is sheet-fed automatically. This saves a considerable amount of time. This is another simple, but tedious, way to digitize paper documents.

A few things to keep in mind are the sizes of paper the scanner can handle, the speed, whether it can scan in color, and black and white, resolution options, and software capabilities. This option could be a good way to start on your document digitization but would be quite the undertaking if you have a large volume of papers to get through, or if some of them are irregular in size or type.

This method produces a PDF with all pages in the proper sequence. Color Mode Windows only. Select a basic color mode Autodetect , Color , Black and White , or Grayscale that your scanner supports.

This option is enabled if your Scanner Options are set to use the Acrobat scanning dialog box instead of the scanner application. Resolution Windows only. Select a resolution that your scanner supports.

If you select a Color Mode or Resolution option not supported by your scanner, a message appears and your scanner application window opens. Select different options in the scanner application window. Paper Size Windows only. Select a paper size or specify a custom Width and Height. Prompt to Scan More Pages.

When selected, a dialog box prompting you to scan additional pages appears after every scanning session. Select this option to run the optimization process on the PDF. This option is used to compresses and filter the images in the scanned PDF.

Click the Settings icon to customize optimization with specific settings for file compression and filtering. Adds the converted scan to an existing PDF. Select an opened file from the drop-down, or browse and select the PDF file. Creates multiple files from multiple paper documents. Click the Settings icon and specify whether to create a PDF Portfolio of the files, the number of pages for each file, and a filename prefix.

Recognize Text OCR. Select this option to convert text images in the PDF to searchable and selectable text. This option applies optical character recognition OCR and font and page recognition to the text images. Click the Settings icon specify settings in the Recognize Text - Settings dialog box. See Recognize text in scanned documents.

Add Metadata. When selected, the Document Properties dialog box appears after scanning. In the Document Properties dialog box, you can add metadata, or information about the scanned document, to the PDF file. If you are creating multiple files, you can enter common metadata for all the files.

Default settings are suitable for a wide range of document pages, but you may want to customize settings for higher-quality images, smaller file sizes, or scanning issues. Apply Adaptive Compression. Divides each page into black-and-white, grayscale, and color regions and chooses a representation that preserves appearance while highly compressing each type of content. The recommended scanning resolutions are dots per inch dpi for grayscale and RGB input, or dpi for black-and-white input.

Applies JPEG compression to the colored image content. Use JPEG instead. By default, the scanner application dialog box does not open. Monochrome Scans. Applies the JBIG2 compression method to black-and-white input pages. Highest-quality levels use the lossless method; at lower settings, text is highly compressed. Compatible with Acrobat 5. For compatibility with Acrobat 4. This fast, lossless compression method is compatible with Acrobat 3.

Rotates any page that is not square with the sides of the scanner bed, to make the PDF page align vertically. Choose On or Off. Background Removal. Then, Off or Low should produce good results.