# 22
The Art of Scanning Acrobat offers several optimizing filters to adjust or correct your scan results:
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Deskew rotates a skewed page so that it’s vertical.The default setting is Automatic.
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Background removal is used with grayscale and color pages to make nearly white areas white, resulting in clearer scans.The default is Low; you can also choose Medium and High options.
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“Edge shadow removal”gets rid of the black edges sometimes seen from scanned pages. The default is Cautious; an aggressive option is also available.
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Despeckle removes black marks from the page. Low is the default; you can also choose Medium and High.•
Descreen removes half-tone dots, like those from a scanned newspaper.The default is Automatic:
Acrobat applies the filter automatically for gray-scale and RGB images of 300 ppi or higher.
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Halo Removal removes high-contrast edges from color pages. The default setting is On.57
#22: Creating a PDF from a Scan in Acrobat 3. To optimize the document’s content, particularly for images, drag the
Optimization slider left (to decrease) or right (to increase) file size and quality. Click Options and set compression and filter settings in the Optimization Options dialog (Figure 22b). Click Custom Settings to activate the Compression and Filtering settings, make the desired adjustments, and click OK to dismiss the dialog and return to the Con-figure Presets dialog. (You can read more about filters in the sidebar
“The Art of Scanning.”)
Figure 22b Specify different ways to improve the appearance of a scanned page or image.
4. Finally, choose options in the Text Recognition and Metadata section of the dialog. The default option for a text preset is to create a search-able document, meaning the contents of the document are converted to words and images. Image presets, on the other hand, don’t use any default selections. Click Options and then change the conversion options. (See #61, “Extracting Active Text from an Image” to learn how that’s done.)
When you have finished, click OK and Acrobat automatically starts the scan. The scanned page opens as a PDF file in Acrobat. Select the command again to scan the next image, and so on.
Checking Your Scan Results
Many of the files you convert to PDF are composed of text and images that you can manipulate using a variety of tools. PDF files created by scans using older versions of Acrobat or from some pro-grams, such as Photoshop, are images only; you can’t make any changes to the file’s contents. Here’s a quick way to tell the difference.
Click the Select tool on the Select & Zoom toolbar. Then click an area of text on the document. If you see the flashing insertion point, you know the page contains text.
If you click a text area on the document and the entire page is selected, you have an image PDF.
C h a p t e r t h r e e Creating PDF Files in Distiller and Acrobat
Starting and Stopping
When you have configured or chosen a scan preset in Acrobat, the settings remain as is until you change them again. Not only that, but once you have made a preset, the next time you start a scan—whether you are in your current Acrobat session or have reopened the program another time—all you have to do is choose the command from the Create drop-down menu and the scan is started automatically.
Make Mine Custom (Windows)
Acrobat offers an opportunity to create custom scan presets. Click the Create PDF task button and choose PDF from Scanner > Custom Scan to open a dialog containing the settings shown in Figure 22a, as well as the options shown in Figure 22b. For a custom scan preset, along with choosing configuration set-tings for the actual scan, you specify a destination for the scanned page, either to a new file or appended to the active document displayed in the program window. If you prefer, click Browse to open a Select File dialog and locate and select a file to which you want the scan attached. As with the standard presets, choose configuration and document options such as Add Metadata and Make Searchable.
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#23: Creating a PDF from a Clipboard Image
Starting and Stopping
When you have configured or chosen a scan preset in Acrobat, the settings remain as is until you change them again. Not only that, but once you have made a preset, the next time you start a scan—whether you are in your current Acrobat session or have reopened the program another time—all you have to do is choose the command from the Create drop-down menu and the scan is started automatically.
Make Mine Custom (Windows)
Acrobat offers an opportunity to create custom scan presets. Click the Create PDF task button and choose PDF from Scanner > Custom Scan to open a dialog containing the settings shown in Figure 22a, as well as the options shown in Figure 22b. For a custom scan preset, along with choosing configuration set-tings for the actual scan, you specify a destination for the scanned page, either to a new file or appended to the active document displayed in the program window. If you prefer, click Browse to open a Select File dialog and locate and select a file to which you want the scan attached. As with the standard presets, choose configuration and document options such as Add Metadata and Make Searchable.