I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.

How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels (“dirty” artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don’t go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren’t possible (at least not in Paperless).

Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      And how do you encode the images of the scan contained in the PDF/A? That’s the crux here.

      • lemming007
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure I understand. I just scan anything and let my software spit out PDF/A

        • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          PDF/A is not an image format. As a document, it may contain images.

          • lemming007
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            My PDF/A documents contain all kinds of content, including text and images. To me, it doesn’t matter what format the encoded images are, as long as I can open them 20 years from now. Why would one care one way or another?

            • Atemu@lemmy.mlOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              I care that the text remains readable (both to me and also software) and that I don’t balloon my storage out of control.

              JPEG (even at higher levels) subjectively degrades text in particular to a degree that I worry about the former and PNG makes me worry about the latter.

              My current plan is to go with the latter since storage is a relatively cheap issue to fix while data loss is pretty much permanent.