I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.
How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels (“dirty” artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don’t go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren’t possible (at least not in Paperless).
Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756
@Atemu
A couple options to create PDFs were mentioned in the linked issue.
Image encoding before PDF creation is immaterial as long as your PDF creator supports them. I use PNG because they’re well supported and lossless.
After conversation to PDF, we’re stuck with what PDF supports: various PNM-ish formats, jbig2, jpg, and jpx (aka jpg2000). Everything else gets converted. Nothing can change that. It’s in the PDF specification. jpx is the best lossy option for text, but support is a mess. 1/2
@Atemu
In theory, you can use image2pdf or ghostscript to pack jpx files into a pdf. Try it, I guess?
There are a bunch of other tools that can scan directly to PDF, multi-page TIFF, or assemble multiple images into a multi-page pdf. Which to choose comes down to what sort of workflow you want.
But if you’re going for the best quality at small size, you’ll have to fight with jpxs. 2/2