Raja's Exocortex

Scanning Text Docs

When scanning handwritten or typed text on white paper, removing the "paper" from the scan is recommended:

  1. The file size reduces by 10x
  2. The text is clearly legible

Steps to Make the Background Pure White

This is suitable for scanned printed material like bills, book pages, etc. Ideally, such materials must be directly scanned using the bitonal scan option and saved to PNG.

  1. Open the image in Gimp.
  2. Use Colors / Levels... and adjust the levels until the background is pure white.
  3. Convert the image to bitonal - Image / Mode / Indexed / Use black and white (1-bit) palette
  4. Export to png format.

PDF Creation

To create a PDF file using the exported PNG and not lose any quality, use ImageMagick convert.exe input.png output.pdf. This will insert the PNG file as-is into a PDF and there will be no loss of image quality.

Steps to Remove the Background

This is useful to scan signatures, company seals, etc. and insert the images into office documents.

  1. Open the image in (Gimp)[https://www.gimp.org].
  2. Use Colors / Levels... and adjust the levels until the background is pure white.
  3. Then use Colors / Color to Alpha... and delete the white color from the image.
  4. Export to png format and preserve the alpha channel.