Tips for Scanning Documents into Adobe Acrobat

When you scan articles to import into Adobe Acrobat, your most important consideration should be the resolution of the scan. The resolution at which you should scan your articles depends on how you anticipate them being used: on-screen from within the Acrobat Reader, or in printed form. If you are not familiar with the imaging terms dpi and resolution, please read the Resolution & Print Size Primer before continuing.

If you anticipate that people will be viewing your document from within the Adobe Acrobat Reader application and not printing it out, scan your originals at 72 dpi for Windows users and 96 dpi for Macintosh users. These numbers are approximately equivalent to 100% of the screen's resolution. If you are scanning a standard 8.5" × 11" piece of paper, it is equivalent to scanning an 8.5" × 11" image.

If you believe that people will not only view your article on-screen but also print it, scan your originals at 120-150 dpi for Windows users and 150-200 dpi for Macintosh users. These numbers are approximately equivalent to 150-200% of the screen's resolution. If you are scanning a standard 8.5" × 11" piece of paper, it is equivalent to scanning a 12.75-17" × 16.5-22" image. When printing documents, Acrobat Reader automatically resizes the document to fit inside a standard sheet of paper. Because of this, larger images - even if they look slightly blurry onscreen - will appear much more clearly when printed after being resized.

Use your own judgment. Begin by scanning and importing a single page of your document into Acrobat. See how it looks on-screen after you import it. If you anticipate that many readers will be printing the article, print a single page. If the page looks blurry either on the monitor or on the printed page, try rescanning the page at a larger dpi or a larger page size.

If you are scanning a large number of pages at a high resolution, be aware that each image is scanned as a .BMP file, which consumes around 8-10 MB of disk space. If you are going to scan a large number of pages at once or if you have a small hard drive (anything with less than 1 GB of free space), it is advised that you use an image editor to convert each page to a .JPG fle for immediate storage, deleting the .BMP to restore used space.