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A few thoughts and a few questions.
Are these patterns on paper that you want to scan into PDF files, or are they electronic files that you want to convert into PDF?
Scanning:
Your patterns are line art (as opposed to photos or continuous tone images). If you were scanning a page of text, which is also line art, you would use a very high resolution because you would care about "jaggies" (rough edges). For your needs, 100 dpi will probably be plenty. You'll see some rough edges, but you won't care, and your files will be much smaller. You can experiment to see if you need a higher resolution or can get away with a lower resolution. There are multiple programs out there than can scan a page and produce a PDF. Check to see if anything came with your scanner. Be aware that there are fancier (and more expensive) programs that are designed to read the text on an image and figure out what the text is. I don't think you'll need this, because the few labels and marks on the pattern can stay as part of the image, and since they are probably hand lettered, the software wouldn't convert them anyway. Save your money. JPEG compression will distort line art, and it will not compress as well, so you probably don't want to use it. If your scanner comes with software to scan a page and create an image, you can use the paid (not the free) versions of Acrobat to convert them to PDF.
CAD:
Some of the clothing CAD programs can export directly to PDF. Check with the vendor. With the latest version, you may not need any other software.
Either:
Once you have a PDF with everything the correct size, watch out for the Paper Scaling of Shrink to Fit in the Print dialog. This can make the files subtly smaller on the printed page.
Regards, Dan-Ari
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