Scanning Lecture Notes – Compression

A new semester is about to begin, so I again set out to organize lecture notes and scan them. This time I intend to invest more time in investigating and perfecting this process. Hopefully, I’ll present my conclusions in a few posts, each focusing on a different aspect.

In the first post, I’ll discuss the various ways to compress scanned lecture notes. Because lecture notes (at least mine) aren’t especially colorful, as I only use one pen at a time, I want the result to be black and white (line art). This allows for readable lecture notes while preserving a small size per page (as you can see in Some Tips on Scanning Lecture Notes).
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Re-distilling PDFs to Reduce Size

I decided to finally learn Qt and started to read “C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4” (first edition), which is available online. The book comes in a zip file that unzips to a huge, 51MB, PDF file. Even considering that the book is quite long (556 pages), the file size is very large compared to what one would usually expect. The huge file size made reading the PDF less convenient, as one notices a considerable delay when opening it (especially if the PDF resides on some portable storage), so I decided to play around a little and see what I could do about it.
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