This looks interesting: http://www.scanr.com/

PDF isn't very efficient unless you OCR the text and then it can start compressing down some. A few years back I started leaving my scans in tif format and then use tools like ImageMagick to convert to gray scale or just drop the number of colors. If your going to clean up the docs afterward then let Adobe OCR them and start drawing lines and such and let it convert the images to objects.

I recently bought the Fujistu SnapScan, and it was totally worth it. My wife had kept all of her class notes, papers, handouts, and any copied articles from her entire college career. It was around 20-25 binders FULL of papers. We were about to move to a tiny little apartment, and there was no way all that junk was going to fit.

So I called around. Kinko's had a service but it was somewhere between 10 and 25 cents a page to scan and dump things into PDFs. For me, it was cheaper to get the scanner in the end. Plus, when I'm finally done (I still have a binder or two to do), I can throw it up on eBay and remake some of what I spent.

It's very fast, scans both sides, and comes with a full version of Acrobat. The OCR in Acrobat seems to work very well.

Which SnapScan do you have?

I am ideally looking for one with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) so that I can set up a bunch of pages and start them and let them go on their own.

Michael

What version of Acrobat? I haven't bothered to try OCR'ing anything in a long time because Acrobat 5 will randomly crash on handwritten stuff.

I got this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BK106C/002-3019336-8943241?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=172282

I have no idea what version of Acrobat it came with. I have been using the OCR on my work machine, which has Acrobat Pro 7.0. I have to say, though, that I have yet to test it on any handwritten stuff, as my wife writes in tiny, crabbed hieroglyphs that no person nor program could understand.