Smooth-scrolling PDFs?

June 5, 2008 11:33 PM

What is the best way to scan documents so that they scroll well in OS X?

Regardless of which scanner I use, I seem to produce PDFs that scroll/change pages very slowly in OS X, and as a result, applications that use OS X's PDF rendering engine. Is there a particular application or settings I can use in Acrobat Professional that will lead to black and white document scans that scroll "like butter"? I'd like it to be 300 dpi or so just for document clarity.

I'm linking to two documents that are similar in content but perform differently.

Smooth-scrolling: http://rocketsilence.com/mefi/greenstein_pols157_example.pdf
Not so much scan: http://rocketsilence.com/mefi/finstat_deckers_example_118.pdf

posted by cgomez to Technology (5 answers total)

I've been scanning docs like mad into my Tiger iMac for weeks now, and have found using the built-in 'Image Capture' to work like a charm.

Your linked 'finstat' document does scan like shit, though, even on my brand new machine. I think 300 dpi is overkill -- I scan all my text docs to no more than 150 dpi. Make sure you're not scanning in color.
posted by skammer at 12:26 AM on June 6, 2008

Obsvervations that might help. I'm no PDF guru...

(1) the smooth-scrolling one appears to be black and white and very high contrast, while your bad-scrolling one is all halftoney. Zoom into like 1600% of each and see how very different the text looks.

(2) Unless I am missing something, the smooth-scrolling one is a big "graphic" -- I cannot select text, only graphic clipping regions, while the bad-scrolling one has individual character glyphs: I can copy and paste from it as text.

Not much of a solution, but maybe a nudge in a useful direction?

(how I wish we could include images in MetaFilter like the olden days...)
posted by rokusan at 5:11 AM on June 6, 2008

I am also scanning documents and I'd like to do it in some form of OCR way. I've seen PDFs of scanned items that I think are using OCR as they are searchable and editable text PDFs.

Is there some Mac software that can do that, hopefully with a version I can try before I buy?
posted by arniec at 6:39 AM on June 6, 2008

Best answer: (An ex post facto solution: open a slow-scanning PDF in Preview, hit Print, and then save it as a PDF. The new one will scroll faster.)
posted by danb at 8:17 AM on June 6, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses folks. I've ended up using an Automator script that does what danb suggested and 'prints' the PDF again, using the OS X quartz engine. It leads to a file about twice the size, but scrolls incredibly well and still retains the OCR/searchability.
posted by cgomez at 12:39 AM on June 7, 2008