I have another take on the .pdf's, and take some issue with Tom.  I have 
scanned my letterhead to a pretty high resolution .tif file.  I can then type 
in photoshop my correspondance, then convert to .pdf - clunky, but it works.  
Files go from 37mb down to a manageable 500kb for e-mail.  I am therefore 
sending a text document that starts as a graphic, and looks great on the screen 
- even prints well.  This also is a way to preserve foreign diacriticals.  


Which brings up a problem I've had:  my Acrobat resists copying those 
diacriticals from webpages; I've tried through Distiller to get them into the 
program, without luck.  Would appreciate any advice on this.


--- On Thu, 1/29/09, Jeff Wright <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Jeff Wright <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [CGUYS] Scanned
To: [email protected]
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 8:33 AM

> PDF is a vector format derived from PostScript. If you had the original
> document file, not a scan, then saving it into PDF would be a good
> idea.
> The PDF would contain the font information, the text (coded as ASCII or
> UTF), and geometry infomation about how the text is positioned on the
> page.
> 
> While a PDF can contain another file format, like TIFF or JPEG, you are
> not accomplishing anything useful by doing that. You are just wrapping
> one file format around a different file format. Double wrapping may be
> good for the freezer, but for digital data it accomplishes nothing
> useful.

You're overthinking this exercise.

Perhaps to you, a graphics person, this data is important.  To the average
user who just needs the document, they don't care about this metadata if
they expect it in read-only form.  I haven't cared a bit about the font
information in any contract or other form I've received as a pdf and no one
has ever complained about a scanned pdf I've sent them.  They just want
what's in the document itself.

It's a good, compact and portable format that most people know what to do
with.  Few people outside of graphics departments have encountered a tiff;
even fewer know what to do with it.


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