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Scanning problems



Please let me bother the group with a mundane problem. I don't know
enough about the technology to speak intelligently, so what I have
to say below may be garbled. If you can help me, please be patient.

I would like to post my lecture transparencies to the web for my
students' benefit. A problem arises when I use color; the files are
too large when I scan them in mindlessly using the software that
came with my scanner. It will handle "line-art", presumably one-bit
intensity resolution, or "gray scale", presumably eight-bit, or
"color RGB", presumably 24-bit (or maybe even 32). For my purpose it
would be both adequate and desirable to have four-bit color.

I could conceivably obtain this result by making color separations
of my scans, reducing each to one-bit resolution, and recombining
the results, or using color filters and line art, and doing three
scans, or putting it in Photoshop and performing tricks I don't know
about, etc. What I want to know is how can I do it *most easily*.
This is a production requirement and there are two or more of us in
the Department who have the same problem. Our technician has limited
time to devote to scanning our transparencies.

This brings me to our second problem. Is there a product out there
that will take a bunch of transparencies in a document feeder and
and scan them in? We haven't found one. We can get the money to buy
hardware and software. Both are cheaper than technicians' time. One
more complication - we are all Mac folk. The technician would like
to be able to do this on his own computer, but there we may have to
bend, I realize, and we have other machines (Windows and unix).

Well, those are our problems, and they should be common problems for
physics teachers, so I hope someone out there has been clever enough
to solve them and will share the solution with the rest of us.

Thanks,

Leigh