Scanning and saving my papers

[Stretchman]

Hi Guys,

I have a bunch of old college papers (blue book exams, essays, etc) that I would like to scan and preserve digitally. My first thought was that I would scan them and then transfer to .pdf files.

What would be the easiest way of going about this? Is there a better route? Thx for your input.

[pam123]

No you've got it.
What program are you going to use to create the .pdf file ?
Most of the .pdf converters require a printable file type so there'll be a problem with old blue books.

[Stretchman]

Actually, I wasn't sure. Could you suggest a program? Is this an area where a simple freeware/shareware program will do, or should I expect to pay a small amount for a good, quality program?

[pam123]

You may like these two programs.
They're both free so if they won't do the job for you it won't cost you anything :

http://www.primopdf.com/
http://www.simpleocr.com/

[mairving]

Check to see if your scanner has pdf capability. Quite a few have a save as pdf option which will save you a step or two. You can save them naturally as a tiff but a pdf will have greater compression.

[Stretchman]

Thank you for your help Pam and Mairv,

I'm going to get started on this today.