One of the most widely used file formats for scanned documents (and almost any type of electronic document) is PDF.
Because PDFs have optical character recognition (OCR) technology built in, you can text search through them, making them a great option for your documents.
If you simply plan to scan your documents and keep them on a hard drive or server,
Only a small number of files need to be scanned each day.
Should you intend to print any papers
Documents that have been archived by your company must be stored as PDF/A (see below).
Document management software is not used by you.
You don’t possess a lot of files.
Another way to save PDFs is as:
It’s preferable to scan in TIFF format if you need to scan a lot of files.
One of the reasons TIFF files are preferred over PDFs when it comes to scanning is that a TIFF file accurately represents the original document.
When working with files that require regular additions
If you work primarily on documents longer than 200 pages
If you intend to install or regularly use a document management system
When you need to convert a lot of files to digital
If you intend to scan your documents, then annotate or edit them
When working with files that need to adhere to specific compliance requirements (like HIPAA),
Let’s investigate the ideal document scanning format.
The most often used file formats for document scanning are TIFF and PDF.
TIFF files are suggested for scanning for a number of reasons. First off, in many instances, the recognition rate is superior to a PDF. In addition, a smaller file size and less memory usage are achievable with appropriate compression (CCITT4).
When it comes to editing options, a PDF format is frequently chosen because there are more programs available.
But a lot of contemporary document management systems (like bitfarm-Archiv) also allow you to edit TIFF files, which means that pages can then be cut, rotated, or added graphic elements (like notes and stamps).
When archiving, bifarm-Archiv formats every file to TIFF.
It is highly advised to set the default profile to black and white with a compression of CCITT 4 and 300 DPI for accurate OCR and small file sizes.
Naturally, higher resolutions are also achievable; however, in order to conserve storage space, the archiving process downconverts them.
However, should I scan documents in PDF or JPEG format?
Numerous document types can be displayed using the Portable Document Format (PDF).
The content of PDFs will always appear uniformly on all devices.
JPEGs typically have small file sizes and compress image data.
Because JPEGs employ lossy compression, a small amount of the image data is lost with each file save.
Users can only copy specific text from PDFs to be used elsewhere.
JPEGs may occupy less space on your cloud, portable disc, or hard drive.
Considering that PDFs can display rich media, they are typically larger than JPEGs.
Let’s see if scanning as a PDF or TIFF works better.
Because PDF files are typically smaller in size and easier to transfer, they are an excellent option for storing document images.
The file size of a PDF document can be altered by formatting it as image-only (no text search) or hidden text (text search).
Because TIFF files are larger and offer higher quality, they are a good option for storing document images.
PDFS ARE MORE SECURE THAN TIFFS.
TIFFs can be compressed to make them smaller in size, but they are typically larger than PDFs.
Since PDFs are typically small files, you might want to start with one instead of a bitonal compressed TIFF.
Your best option will be a PDF file because these files were designed to work with a wide range of hardware and software configurations.