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Technical background to PDF font options

Kevin Newman — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:00:11 +0000

Editors Note: This article is part of our Under The Hood of a PDF series which examines PDF files from a technical perspective.

The PDF specification provides many options for the display of textual content and the related extraction of the text content. In this article I will try to highlight the key areas and terms that you will encounter when working under the hood with fonts in PDF files. Key terms that you should take note of are in bold.

PDF text definitions

Each block of text in a PDF document consists of four sets of data.

The encoded characters which are sequences of bytes that represent the individual character codes that make up the text
The font data which is a group of glyphs (character visualisations) accessed by a unique number called a Glyph ID
A map that links the encoded character codes to Glyph IDs
A map that links the character codes to Unicode values. This map is not needed when displaying the PDF but is required to allow the user to extract text content from the document (for example when selecting text and copying it to the clipboard to be pasted into another application).

Multiple blocks of encoded characters can be linked to the same maps and font data.

Font data

The font data can be stored in a number of possible formats:

Adobe Type 1 Font Format, known as a Type 1 font
Adobe Compact Font Format, known as a CFF font
A standard TrueType font
An OpenType font which has a similar structure to a TrueType font but allows the glyph outline descriptions to be either TrueType or CFF format.
A Type 3 font which uses PDF drawing commands to define the glyph outlines. This font format allows greater flexibility over the appearance of the glyphs but does not include a hinting mechanism resulting in reduced visual quality for small text or low resolutions.

Font embedding

Font data can be embedded into the PDF. This allows the PDF to be viewed in exactly the same way on any computer. If the font data is not embedded the PDF viewer it is simply specified by name.

Non-embedded fonts force the PDF viewer application to look on the user’s computer for a similar font. This may result in differences in the display of the text when viewed on different computers with different installed fonts.

Embedded font data can consist of a complete font file or it can be a font subset which contains only the font data for a smaller number of glyphs. For example, if a PDF consists mainly of English text with a small piece of Japanese text, the font for the Japanese text could be subsetted to only include the glyphs actually used discarding the font data for the unused glyphs. This dramatically reduces the size of the embedded font data resulting in a smaller file size for the PDF.

Encoding formats

Fonts can specify either simple or composite encoding.

Simple encoding uses 8-bit character codes mapped to a character set. This means that a maximum of 255 characters can be displayed from the font.

Predefined character sets can be used directly or adjusted using a differences array. The predefined character set encodings are:

StandardEncoding is the default character set used for Latin-text Type 1 font programs. This is a direct mapping to the order of the glyphs in the font.
MacRomanEncoding is the standard 8-bit character set used in Western versions of the Apple Mac OS operating system. Type 1 and TrueType fonts usually contain an internal cmap table to map character codes to Glyph IDs.
WinAnsiEncoding is the standard Windows-1252 character set used in Western versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Type 1 and TrueType fonts usually contain an internal cmap table to map character codes to Glyph IDs.

The alternative is composite encoding which uses a two step process to encode characters:

In the first step, the defined encoding format is used to translate a character code to a character identifier or CID. The CID value is used to look up font metrics for the character (such as the vertical and horizontal width of the character).
The second step uses a setting from the font definition to translate the CID to a Glyph ID allowing the character to be displayed using the glyph description in the font data.

Composite encoding allows characters to be encoded using multiple bytes. Fixed‑length encoding uses the same number of bytes for each character while variable‑length encoding can use varying byte lengths for different character codes.

For example, UCS‑2 is a fixed‑length encoding that always uses two bytes for each character with the character codes representing characters in the Unicode character set.

UTF‑16 is another encoding for the Unicode character set. It is a variable‑length encoding that uses two bytes for most common characters and four bytes for others.

The variable-length UTF-8 encoding uses from one to four bytes to encode the Unicode character set. Single-byte character codes are used for most English text, two or three bytes for common characters in other languages and four bytes for rarely used characters.

Shift JIS uses one or two bytes to encode Japanese characters corresponding to Code Page 932 used in the Japanese version of Microsoft Windows.

Identity‑H is a simple fixed-length mapping that uses 16-bit character codes. Each two-byte character code maps directly to a CID value.

For composite encoding a structure called a CMap is used to define the encoding format and the character set of the encoded character codes. A special type of CMap called a ToUnicode CMap is used to translate from CID values to Unicode character codes.

When composite encoding is used with either TrueType fonts or OpenType fonts containing TrueType glyph outlines a CIDToGIDMap structure is used to translate CIDs to Glyph IDs.

When composite encoding is used with either CFF fonts or OpenType fonts containing CFF glyph outlines the font data is used to translate CIDs to Glyph IDs.

PDF Standard Fonts

The PDF specification provides a list of fonts known as the standard 14 fonts. These fonts are guaranteed to be available in all PDF viewer applications that conform to the PDF specification so text using these standard fonts do not require embedded font data.

Adobe Font Packs

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have a feature that automatically downloads and installs a Font Pack when a PDF document is opened containing non-embedded fonts with font names that match the fonts in the Font Pack.

For example, the font named HeiseiKakuGo-W5 is part of the Asian Font Pack. A PDF document could contain a non-embedded font with this font name. If Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader opens such a PDF document and the font isn’t available on the system it will offer to automatically download the Asian Font Pack and successfully display the content of the PDF.

Predefined CMaps

The PDF specification provides a list of predefined CMaps. A PDF document may contain text that has been encoded using any of these predefined CMaps without embedding the CMap into the file. This reduces the file size of the PDF and allows text to be extracted easily.

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Earning Money in the Freelance Market with PDF Conversion (to source documents)

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 06:00:44 +0000

If you are one of the many skilled and adept workers in the ever-increasing freelance market and you are looking to do something really new, try ‘PDF conversion’, and read on…

Search out a good freelance market

There are various websites offering freelance work, choose the one you are comfortable with. You can choose from Elance, Getafreelancer or Limexchange and many more like these.

Learn how to bid

Bidding is an essential part of the process. Try to bid in a productive way and provide your working hours and availability too. Make a bid between the range specified by the provider if you feel you can live up to the provider’s expectation.

Converting PDF to other documents professionally

You might wonder why would you opt for PDF conversion? Well firstly, PDF conversion to is one of the hottest projects that you can find on the freelance market because once a PDF has been created — it be can be almost considered to be like a printed piece of paper. With very few exceptions, it has almost no knowledge of its source application. Second, editing PDF is generally not easy for “non-experts” — many PDF users do not have the ability or even capability to convert PDF to Word, PowerPoint or even HTML. Thirdly, PDF files can have security restrictions, people cannot copy or paste the content to Word document because of these restrictions. Many times there are users who have the legal right to get the content but don’t want to retype the PDF again hence they post these kinds of projects to freelance market

Job providers will send you some PDF files, and then you need to convert them to the formats they want. Usually, the provider will require that the original text content, images, layouts and even hyperlinks should be retained in the final format. Though various PDF converters are available in the market, you need to find the best one or even purchase a few to assemble a collection so you can produce the best results for your clients.

If the provider wants you to convert a scanned PDF, then you need an OCR converter. OCR’ing is required to create text in the PDF by analyzing the scanned image for characters that it recognizes as text.

Good luck!

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PDFs And MAC OS X Preview

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:55:59 +0000

Do you know that if you are using MAC OS X, you don’t need a PDF reader to view your PDF files?

If you want to discover this secret do the following:

1- Go to: Macintosh HD:Applications:Preview.

2- Double click at the Preview icon.

3- The Preview icon will appear at the Dock (appears at the bottom of the screen where your frequently used applications, files, and folders appear), and at the top of the screen, the Preview menu appears.

4- Now, it is time to open your PDF. Here, you can do this in three ways:

4.1. From Preview’s menu, choose: File -> Open…

4.2. Drag the PDF document to the Preview application icon.

4.3. If Adobe Reader is not installed, by double clicking the PDF document.

You should get something as shown in figure (1) below.

Figure (1): Opening A PDF Document Using Preview

There are also many other things you can do with Preview. A really nice feature here is that you can save your PDF document pages to different formats (GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, Microsoft BMP, OpenEXR, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, TIFF).

So, in order for example to save a PDF document’s page to JPEG format, do the following:

1- Open the PDF document using Preview as shown in the preceding steps.

2- From Preview’s menu, choose: File -> Save As…, in which case, you should have a dialog appear as shown in figure (2).

Figure (2): Preview’s Save As Dialog Box

3- In Format, choose JPEG.

4- If you want, change the quality and resolution.

5- Click the Save button. In this case, you should have something similar to what is shown in figure (3).

Figure (3): First Page Of The PDF Document Saved As A JPEG Format

A final feature I want to talk about here that you can do to your PDFs is the feature of sending your PDF document as an email directly from within Preview.

To do this, try the following steps:

1- Open the PDF document using Preview as previously shown.

2- From Preview’s menu, choose: File -> Mail Document, in which case, the Mail application opens and the New Message window appears so you can send the PDF document. Look at figure (4).

Figure (4): Sending The PDF Document Directly From Within Preview Through Mail

3- In the New Message window, type the receiver’s email and the subject, and hit the Send button located at the top left of the New Message window. Isn’t that beautiful?

Reference:
PDF Hacks, 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tool
By: Sid Steward
Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Pub. Date: August 16, 2004
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-596-00655-6

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Viewing PDF Documents In MAC OS X Using Firefox

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:41 +0000

Are you using MAC OS X and Firefox and would like to view PDF documents directly through Firefox? Then this article is for you.

In order to do that using Firefox, we need an extra “Add-on” for Firefox, since this feature does not come built-in with your Firefox installation.

So, what “Add-on” do we need here?

The “Add-on” that we need for this task is called: Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X 1.1.3.

Let us now go ahead and see how to get this “Add-on”, install it, and use it in Firefox.

1- Fire up your Firefox browser.

2- Go to this web page: https://addons.mozilla.org

3- In the search for add-ons text box, copy the following sentence: Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X 1.1.3, which is the name of the add-on, and paste it in the text box.

4- Leave the second text box all add-ons as is, and click the green button that has a white triangle inside it.

5- You will get a new search results page with one result displayed in it. Look at figure (1).

Figure (1): The Search Results Page

6- Click at the Firefox PDF Plugin for MAC OS X link, in which case, the download page such as the one shown in figure (2) below should appear.

Figure (2): The Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X 1.1.3 Download Page

7- Before going ahead and adding the “Add-on”, check first that the “Add-on” is compatible with the version of the Firefox installation you have.

If you look under the green Add to Firefox (MacOSX) button, and beside Works with, you will notice the following written: Firefox: 3.6b1pre – 3.6.*, which represents the Firefox versions the current release of the “Add-on” works with.

If you don’t have suitable version of Firefox the add-on works with, you can update your Firefox version by going to Help -> Check for Updates…, or, if you want to keep your older version of Firefox, you can check if there are other older releases of the “add-on” that work with your version of Firefox by clicking the View All Versions link at the bottom of the “Add-on” download page. Look at figure (2).

8- When you are ready for adding the “Add-on”, simply click at the green Add to Firefox (MacOSX) button, in which case, a dialog box appears as shown in figure (3).

Figure (3): The Install Add-on Dialog Box

9- Click the Install Now button.

10- When the “Add-on” is being downloaded, click on the Restart Firefox button in order to complete your changes. Look at figure (4).

Figure (4): Firefox PDF Plugin For Mac OS X 1.1.3 Installed And Restarting Firefox Required For Changes To Take Place

11- After installing and restarting Firefox, let us check if the “Add-on” was installed successfully. In order to do that, and in the Firefox menu bar, click on Tools and then choose Add-ons.

If your “Add-on” was installed successfully, you should see a message saying: 1 new add-on has been installed with an orange background. Look at figure (5).

Figure (5): Firefox PDF Plugin For Mac OS X 1.1.3 Installed Successfully

And, thus, should have the Firefox PDF Plugin For Mac OS X available in the Add-ons list. Look at figure (6).

Figure (6): Firefox PDF Plugin For Mac OS X Available in the Add-ons List

Having installed the “Add-on” successfully, let us see now how we can use it.
a- Go to: http://www.google.com
b- Click on the Advanced Search link.
c- Under Find web pages that have… and beside the all these words: field, type Software Engineering or whatever you like.
d- Under Need more tools? and beside the File type: field, choose Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf). Look at figure (7).

Figure (7): Google Advanced Search

e- Click the Advanced Search button.

f- In the results page, choose whatever link you like. Say we chose Process Models in Software Engineering.
Notice that instead of being prompted to choose a PDF viewer you use in order to open the PDF file, or save it and view it using any PDF viewer you use, and this was the case before installing this “Add-on”, you can view the PDF file directly from within your Firefox browser.

So, if you hadn’t had the Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X, you will have as shown in figure (8).

Figure (8): The Way Of Viewing PDF Files Without The Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X

But, when you are having the Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X, and thus the ability of viewing the PDF files within your Firefox browser, you should have something like shown in figure (9) after clicking on the PDF file link.

Figure (9): The Way Of Viewing PDF Files Through The Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X

Voila!

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Downloading Your Google Docs Document As PDF

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:11:38 +0000

Google Docs is really a wonderful alternative to Office applications where you can create your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms.

Suppose you have created a “Document” through Google Docs and wanted that document in PDF format. What to do?

Simply follow the steps below.

1- Open your document using Google Docs. Look at figure (1).

Figure(1): Google Docs Document

2- Click on the “File” option from the menu bar.

3- Choose Download As —> PDF.

In this case, the PDF file will be downloaded to your machine, and will open automatically, in which case you should get something like as shown in figure (2) below.

Figure(2): The Downloaded PDF File

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Viewing PDF Attachments As Plain HTML In Gmail

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:09:58 +0000

As you know, as a Gmail user, you can view the PDF attachments directly from within Gmail.

But, did you know that you can view the PDF files in Plain HTML format using Gmail?

In order to do this, simply follow the following steps:

1- Open the email message that contains a PDF attachment within it. Look at figure (1).

Figure (1): Part Of A Gmail Message With A PDF Attachment

2- Click at the “View” link, in which case you should have something similar to what is shown in figure (2).

Figure (2): The Way The Document Appears After Clicking At The View Link

3- Now, since you want to view the PDF file as Plain HTML, simply click at the Plain HTML link at the top of the page, in which case you should have something similar to what is shown in figure (3).

Figure (3): The Plain HTML View Of The PDF Document

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From Microsoft Office PowerPoint Mac 2008 To PDF

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:38:33 +0000

Maybe you have done some presentation slides that you want to share but don’t want to be modified for example. For this purpose, the solution might to go with PDF.

So, you have a presentation created with Microsoft Office PowerPoint Mac 2008 and want to convert to PDF. In order to do so, simply follow the steps below:

1- Open your presentation using Microsoft Office PowerPoint Mac 2008. Look at figure (1).

Figure (1): Presentation opened using Microsoft Office PowerPoint Mac 2008

2- Click at the “File” option from the menu bar.

3- Choose “Save As…“. Look at figure (2).

Figure (2): The Save As dialog box in Microsoft Office PowerPoint Mac 200

4- In the “Format” option, choose PDF.

5- Navigate to the place where you stored your PDF file.

6- Double click on the PDF file to open it, in which case, you should have something as shown in figure (3).

Figure (3): The created PDF file

And that’s it…

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From Microsoft Office Word Mac 2008 To PDF

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:51:40 +0000

Imagine yourself working with your Microsoft Office: Word Mac 2008 writing that document that you will be sending to your manager.

You are working calmly since you recognized that you are able to meet the deadline which is after a couple of hours.

You have finished now, and ready to submit the document.

But, there seems that there are submission guidelines you have to follow that you told yourself you’ll see once finished writing the document.

What is that?! A guideline is telling you that you have to submit the document in PDF format. And, there is no time, what to do?

Don’t worry, this is so simple with Microsoft Office: Word Mac 2008. Just follow the following steps:

1- Open your document using Microsoft Office: Word Mac 2008. Look at figure (1).

Figure(1): Document opened using Microsoft Office Word Mac 2008

2- Click at the “File” option from the menu bar.

3- Choose “Save As…“. Look at figure (2).

Figure(2): The Save As dialog box in Microsoft Office Word Mac 2008

4- In the “Format” option, choose PDF.

5- Navigate to the place where you stored your PDF file.

6- Double click on the PDF file to open it, in which case, you should have something as shown in figure (3).

Figure(3): The created PDF file

You are all set. Go ahead an send the document to your manager. But, don’t forget the other guidelines!

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Improving the Reading Experience in the Sony Reader

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:41:02 +0000

Today there are variety of reading devices available in the marketplace, among these Sony Reader has been a very popular choice for users. The official format for Sony Reader is BBeB Book (LRF) but as PDF is such a widely used document format, it has also necessary been necessary for Sony to provide support for this as well.

Here’s how to enhance the reading experience in the Sony Reader when you’re using PDF?

a) Resize/Reformat the PDF

Why not just convert the PDF to Word then resize the content for the Reader screen size, then save as .rtf format. Put into Sony Reader by using any free PDF Converter, which can keep all the layouts and text content after conversion.

b) Increasing page refresh speed

Speed of page refresh is one of the most important factors for enhancing reading experience. Books in BBeB format are good, but there will be about one second delay when you switch to the next page when you read in PDF format. Reading text document (.txt) is much faster. If your PDF is text based file, then convert it to plain text first using any PDF to text converter and then enjoy.

c) Create PDF for Sony Reader

All versions of Sony Reader does not support Word format. Take for example, the Sony Reader PRS-505 only supports PDF, BBeB and Text. Those who are using the former version of Sony Reader can create their own PDF files and make them portable. Microsoft Office 2007 provides the ’save as PDF’ add-on, just click on “save as” and you can see PDF is on the list. By this way, you can save the Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet as PDF format.

To learn more tips and tricks visit www.4pdf.com regularly.

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Tips for Converting PDF to Excel

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:54:08 +0000

PDF has become a common document format for exchanging and transferring files for a number of reasons including its security features, compact size and compatibility. A variety of financial statements, budget statistics and other data summary Excel spreadsheets are saved into PDF files after they are finished with editing. However, often there is still a requirement to revise the data, and as we know, this is (usually) not possible once a file has been converted to a PDF.

That said, one can convert PDF files back to Excel using some of the conversion software available. On such software is AnyBizSoft PDF to Excel Converter. The application is specifically designed for converting PDF files to Microsoft Excel documents (.xls, .xlsx). With the use of this application, all the original layouts, text content, and images can be retained in the generated Excel document. After the document conversion, you can copy and modify the content of PDF file in Excel.

The following steps guide you through conversion of PDF to Excel:

a) Download and install AnyBizSoft PDF to Excel Converter

One can download the program here: PDF to Excel Converter. When finished downloading, click on the anybizsoft-pdf-to-excel.exe file and follow the installation wizard instructions to install it.

b) Launch PDF to Excel Converter

Run the shortcut of PDF to Excel Converter on your desktop to launch it. Then click on the Add Files button above the panel to add files for conversion or one can directly drag PDF files into the panel. The application supports conversion of up to 200 files at one time. It also supports conversion of PDF files with copy and print restrictions.

Advance Settings: Select certain pages and set an output files path

In case you want to convert just some pages of files, click Selected Pages field and type the page numbers to be converted. The Excel file converted will save in the source file folder if you select Save in the same folder as source. Also, one can choose another destination by clicking Customize.

c) Start converting

Now all you need is to click the Convert button below the panel, and your PDF files will be converted one by one. When the conversion completes, you can open the converted Excel files directly through the links in the panel or open the destination folder by clicking the button Open below the panel.

To learn more tips and tricks, visit www.4pdf.com

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2 Ways to Convert PDF to PowerPoint

4x PDF Tutorial Team — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:24:21 +0000

Today PDF is arguably the most widely used “final form” of document. Some of the reasons behind this are its paper-like property, quality of layout, security, compact size, accessibility and usage restrictions. Due to this, most documents formats like Word, Excel and PowerPoint are converted to PDF after finalized editing.

That said, the limited features of PDF editing sometimes can come as a drawback for people as they cannot edit them easily — for whatever reason.

Let’s take take PowerPoint slides that have been converted to PDF — and teachers, lectures, technology commentators, etc. If changes are necessary and the source document is nowhere to be found, then the most effective method (aside from starting again from scratch) is to convert the PDF back to PowerPoint.

Luckily, there are a couple of free ways of doing this:

Indirect Conversion through Image Conversion

1) PDF to Image

One can use a free online service like convertpdftoimage.com to convert your PDF to Image files.

2) Insert Images into PowerPoint slides

Start PPT presentation, click Insert Slide (from outline), then click Insert Album from File/Disk, browse and find your desired images and select them to Insert, now you’ll find your PDF files are converted into PPT slides. After this, simply adjust and add content onto them.

Indirect Conversion via Word

1) PDF to Word

There is a free online service like PDF Online to convert your PDF to Word documents.

2) Word to PowerPoint

Start the PPT presentation, click Insert Slide (from outline), then click Object and Create from file to browse to find your desired images, select them and Insert. The content of Word file will insert into slides so that you can do further addition of content.

Note: You’re lucky — a few years ago — this used to be a) a whole harder and b) costly!

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Tip On Adding Bookmarks To A PDF Portfolio

Rowan Hanna — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:11:39 +0000

Acrobat for Legal Professionals has a great tip on how to add bookmarks to a PDF Portfolio.

People like Bookmarks so much, they wish they could have the same organization tool for a PDF Portfolio, which is a collection of individual documents in a PDF container. I have several other articles you can read on Portfolios in my Portfolio Category.

While PDF Portfolios don’t have bookmarks per se, I do have a workaround that might make many of you happy

Read the full tip: Can a PDF Portfolio have bookmarks?

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Free Book Chapter: How to Create a PDF Portfolio

Rowan Hanna — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:00:04 +0000

Peachpit has published a chapter from Donna Baker’s latest book, Acrobat 9 HotTo’s online. The free chapter deals with how to create PDF Portfolios in Acrobat 9.

A portfolio is a great way to bring all the material for a project or a task together, while maintaining the features of the component files and including navigation controls.

Free chapter: How to Produce a PDF Portfolio in Adobe Acrobat 9.

Donna has written quite a few books about Acrobat, as well as Dreamweaver, Indesign and other Adobe products…

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PDF Tools For Linux

Rowan Hanna — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:55:26 +0000

Linux hasn’t received much attention from the PDF world over the years and it’s not hard to understand why. First, Linux relies on open source developers (i.e. people doing stuff for free) and PDF creators, editors and viewers don’t appear to be on the priority list. Second, most of the PDF community — Adobe as well as independent PDF developers — do their work for profit, so they aren’t willing to dedicate time to making their applications Linux compatible if there isn’t a tangible return. Mac and Windows users are generally happy to buy software; Linux users, not so much.

Having said that, some good time have given up their time to create some PDF applications for Linux. Here’s a quick reference point if you’re looking for some of these applications:

Post a link in the comments if you think any other Linux PDF relevant links should be added to this list. Enjoy!

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A Technical Guide To Creating And Sharing Digital Documents

Rowan Hanna — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:32:07 +0000

Do you want to learn how to create high-quality digital documents from paper documents? If you replied with an emphatic yes, then I’ve got the perfect article for you. A guide to sharing documents takes you through the entire process: from getting the best results when scanning, to explaining the OCR’ing process and finally a demonstration on how to the best results when converting the scanned image to PDF.

This guide specializes on how to produce a digital document that is worth sharing. Namely the technical aspect, the trade-off between quality and file size. This guide aims to empower you to get most out of that trade-off. Too many people share low quality documents that are too big, and that is not only a waste of bandwidth, but also of time, because others will have to scan the same document again later, or at least spend considerable time cleaning it up. Scanning documents is a lot of work, and it’s a pity if it has to happen twice.

Full article: Guide to sharing documents.

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