Technology Training and Education

Scan a Paper Document to PDF

1.  Make sure your scanner has been properly installed on your computer

2.  Open Adobe Acrobat X

3.  Click on Create > point your cursor to PDF from Scanner


4.  Here you will see five preset options

  • Autodetect Color Mode
  • Black & White Document
  • Grayscale Document
  • Color Document
  • Color Image

5.  To see what each of these preset options does, click on Configure Presets


 

Configure Presets for Scan

1.  In the Configure Presets window, next to Presets, you can select one of the preset options from the menu to see its settings

2.  For example, if you choose Color Document you can see that:

  • Both sides of the paper will be scanned

  • The color mode is Color

  • You can adjust the resolution of the scan

  • You can also adjust the paper size

3.  Under Document Settings section, you can do the following:

  • Check the box next to optimize if you want Adobe to apply optimization settings to the scanned picture that is being turned into a PDF, this is usually good to keep checked

  • Below that you can adjust the slider as to whether you prefer the PDF to be of lower quality but have a Small Size file, or if you want it to be High Quality, but with a large file size

  • Click Options to adjust the optimization settings

    • In the Optimize Scanned PDF window that opens, under Optimization Options check the box next to Apply Adaptive Compression if you want Adobe to compress areas that are color or grayscale differently than monochrome areas. For example, if this remains on Adobe will highly compress monochrome areas, or areas of text, to reduce the file size, but will only slightly compress pictures to retain their quality

    • Under the Filters section, turn Deskew on if you want Adobe to straighten any PDFs that were scanned slightly crooked

    • Choose a level of Background Removal if the paper you are scanning has a lot of creases or dirt or an image on the back side showing through, all of these will be removed

    • If you are scanning a document that has been printed and has a half-tone screen sometimes you will get a weird pattern, called a Moire pattern. If this happens then in this window make sure to turn Descreen on.

    • Also, sometimes when you scan text you can get a little halo around the text, making it hard to read. Turn Text Sharpening on to remove this and make the text clearer to read

    • Click OK when you are finished

  • Back in the Configure Presets window, check the box next to Make Searchable (Run OCR) if you want to be able to search the scanned text

  • Click on Options

    • In the window that opens, next to Primary OCR Language select the primary language of the document you are scanning

    • Click Ok

  • Check the box next to Make PDF/A-1b compliant if you want to turn the scan into an archived PDF, which is very difficult to modify, so you are basically making an archive or digital copy of the scan

  • When you are done click Save

4.  All of these settings can be changed for each profile

5.  You can also create your own scanning profile for one time use by clicking on Create > point your cursor to PDF from Scanner > click on Custom Scan…