Hey there. For an online job application, I must submit a scan of my college transcript with a file size of no greater than 500Kb (in .jpg or .gif format). Because the physical transcript is three 8.5"x11" pages long with some pretty small print, I’m having a terribly difficult time meeting the 500Kb requirement and still achieving a clear, readable, black and white scan. I’m not a whiz when it comes to this stuff, so I’m hoping someone knowledgeable might be able to tell me what I can do to accomplish this, or whether it’s simply impossible. Thank you so much! 
First of all, you should save it in .jpg format instead of .gif. A gif that large in dimensions will be large in file size.
Did you scan it in B&W? B&W should make it smaller in size. With some scanners, if you set it to B&W line art, or something similar, it will not be a very good quality. Try scanning as a B&W photo. If that fails to produce a quality scan, then scan it as a high quality color photo (or something similar) and use Photoshop (or something similar) to make it B&W.
Don’t increase the pixel size of the image, keep it original. You can play around with the DPI. Try a scan at 72DPI which will be a smaller size. Then increase the DPI to around 90 and see how it looks. When you save as a .jpg, don’t save at the highest quality, save around medium or medium high.
Hope this helps!
DO NOT save as a JPEG. JPEG will smear the text, and render the fine print completely illegible.
Scan at about 150DPI, in full color. Use your graphic editing software (Photoshop, or GIMP, or whatever) to make the text sharp edged and dark. You will want to work with color settings (contrast, gamma, histogram curves, etc.), not any kind of sharpening effects. Convert to grayscale, and touch up the sharpness again.
Now convert to B/W. Your software should let you play with the splitting level for sepearting black and white. Twiddle it a little to get the clearest text with the least “snow” in the white spaces around the text.
Save as GIF.
I just did a full page this way, and got a page down to 41.1K. Getting 3 pages into 500K shouldn’t be too difficult.
Well, when I said to save as a JPEG vs. a GIF, I was also going for ease of use. Sure, you could do all that fiddling with it, which by the way, that is good info for the experienced people, but that sounds like a lot of work.
Saving as a JPEG without all that adjusting and saving as a GIF will not get the file size as small, but will get it under the 500K limit without too much hassle.
If you want to email it to me at tal@talhost.net I’ll be happy to convert it for you, i’ve had some practice doing this…you should try newspaper articles! they’re a pain…
just to clarify…i meant send me a good color quality scan (size doesn’t matter) and i’ll get the size down without compromising quality too much…
I also just realised (this is cause myself i’m a trusting person and sometimes i just don’t think) that your document may have personal info on it and you may well not want to send that to a stranger - which is ok… but the offer is still open if you wish…
I just converted my GIF to JPG, and using the lowest quality, got it down to 50KB. The jpeg has smears and looks like crap. The GIF is smaller, and looks damned good.
A jpg has to store at least 8 times as much data (8 bits per pixel) as the GIF (B/W 1 bit per pixel,) and then use its lossy compression to make the file small.
The GIF has been carefully reduced to a single bit per pixel, and then uses a lossless compression.
The GIF will come out better in the end, and the amount of work is about the same, if you count twiddling with the save parameters for the jpg.
From this site…
http://www.headfrst.com/dontest.htm
comes this info…
*JPG and GIF protocols both have benefits and disadvantages that make them more
useful in some situations than others. GIFs excel when your image is composed
of areas of flat colour with a limited (less than 256 colour) palette and, of course,
when your image requires transparency or animation.
JPGs are better suited to images with continuous tone (photos, gradients, etc.) and
when small file size and speed of loading is the goal.*
Wowzers you guys are great! I will use all this wonderful advice tomorrow when I can get access to a scanner and Photoshop. Thanks again!
Hey!!!
For black and white documents JPEG is not adequate. Scan as B&W at 300 DPI and save as GIF and you should get good results. Maybe even 200 DPI will do. If you want even smaller file size save as TIFF using CCITT Group 4 (2d) compression (about 50KB / page @ 200dpi). I find that gives the smallest file size of all but some people prefer GIF to TIFF so i only use it whan I have to. Another advantage of TIFF is that it allows several pages in the same file. At any rate, 500 KB per page is way too much.
whuckfistle’s quote is just one moreo point for gif over jpeg in this case. Another important one is that gif images in greyscale are usually about the same size as jpegs. If there is no need for color, you lose a big jpeg advantage. Throw in Mort Furd’s point about sharpness, and it’s case closed.