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
PDF/A
And how do you encode the images of the scan contained in the PDF/A? That’s the crux here.
I’m not sure I understand. I just scan anything and let my software spit out PDF/A
PDF/A is not an image format. As a document, it may contain images.
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?
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.