Sticking with the pretty geeky educational requests, today revolves around scanning.
While discussing something in class, my girlfriend used an ACLU ad to make a point about writing argumentative essays. Before I get cries of, “wicked, liberal teachers, forcing their opinions on our youth!”, let it be known that she showed the ad as an example of something that fails. The advertisement does not live up to its claim and it does very little to actually prove the bold headline of “Thanks to modern science 17 innocent people have been removed from death row. Thanks to modern politics 23 innocent people have been removed from the living.” Now, let me continue.
Our copy machine is down, so she turned to the computer to get copies of the ad to her students. I thought it would be a quick matter of scanning the image and churning out a PDF or high quality JPG. From within Photoshop, that’s indeed the case. However, to create a file that everyone can access, print, and read is not so easy. Most PDFs or JPGs I produced printed terribly, even if they were large enough to read on screen.
The closest I got to a legible version was by creating a maximum quality JPG of the ad, but even that version is not as clear as I’d hoped. It’ll work, but there must be a better way.
Without discussing issues of copyright law, of which I break several in my daily pursuit of high-quality instructional materials, what’s the best series of steps to follow to get from a printed page to the Web, while still allowing for a printed version to be legible? If I have an old handout of which an electronic version doesn’t exist, how can I get that online and have the quality high enough that I can easily print it out and still read it?
2 comments
2. Todd says:
I know you were in the middle of 55 things this afternoon. Let’s you and I sit down and talk about this on Thursday, eh? You can help me get the process down for doing this quickly. Once the steps are clear, this will be easy to do in the future.
1. Laurie says:
[4/4/2006 - 7:37 pm]
You could use unsharp mask to sharped the text and then using the brightness and contrast you can really get a clear image. Sorry…should have told you that this afternoon huh?