Recommendations for storing documents electronically?

[TnT]

What I usually do is scan grayscale, because the text will be all chunky if i do bw, and then use tone balance, brightness, contrast to make the background white and the text dark. Although I don't scan documents that much, so it works for a few, but for lots of work would probably be too time consuming.

[Wombat]

Another way to do it is to change the color map, and just have any black value below X go to white.

[isochar]

I still get a dot pattern in the background with this specific sheet of paper, even in B&W Document mode. I'll try another sheet and see what happens.

As for the size? (I'm shooting for a copier-like print)

*edit*

I scanned a blank sheet of paper using B&W Document Mode. Then printed out the image with Photoshop, fitting the image to the paper size. Here's the result:

[seether]

The dot pattrn sounds like moire, which should be an easy fix through either the scanner's TWAIN driver or just scan resolution settings.

The easiest way to get rid of a background I can think of in photoshop is to spend a few seconds with the clone tool to get rid of any large specs of dirt or whatever on the paper background, then use the magic lasso tool to select all of the background and cut it, then set to transparency so it won't print.

Also, I'm with Gurm about Postscript being a huge pain in the neck, and at least for me when I use screen resolution to create PDFs, they often look so bad they're hardly ledgible.

Would making HTML documents be out of the question? That would take care of any file size constraints and all cross platform compatability, and making HTML docs is alot quicker than Acrobat or Distiller.

Just some Ideas for you

[isochar]

HTML would be nice, but it wouldn't be able to print out as a copy... unless there was a jpg.

That leads to another issue, is a combination of archiving a pdf together with an OCR of it possible?