Convert Scanned Images to PDF

Solicitor archiving a paper contract

A small solicitor practice receives a sixteen page paper contract that needs to be archived as a single PDF in the firm's document management system. They scan each page on the office flatbed at 300 DPI, producing sixteen JPG files. FixTools combines them into one A4 PDF in under twenty seconds, the file is named with the client matter number, and it lands in the document management system without any of the page images ever passing through a cloud service that the firm's data protection policy would prohibit.

Family digitising an inheritance of paper letters

A family inheriting a relative's archive of paper letters spends an afternoon scanning a hundred and twenty letters on a portable document scanner. Each letter is one to four pages. They batch the scans into separate folders per letter, run each through FixTools to produce one PDF per letter, and archive the PDFs to a private cloud drive with descriptive names. The originals can then be safely stored in archival sleeves while the family searches and shares the digital copies.

Researcher digitising microfiche printouts

A historical researcher prints fifty pages of microfiche records at a national archive, then scans them at home for searchable archival. FixTools combines the JPG scans into a single PDF per archive record, preserving page order via filename sorting. The resulting PDFs go into the researcher's citation database with proper metadata, replacing the bulky paper printouts which can then be recycled now that the digital copies exist.

Accountant assembling tax records for a client

An accountant receives a shoebox of paper receipts from a small business client at year end. They scan the receipts at 200 DPI using a desktop ADF scanner that outputs JPG, end up with three hundred and twenty image files, and want to deliver one PDF per expense category to the client and to HMRC. FixTools handles each category folder in turn, producing six clean PDFs in twenty minutes total, all without any of the receipt images passing through a third-party converter where tax data could leak.

300 DPI is the standard threshold for archival document scans and matches the resolution most printers can reproduce. 150 DPI is acceptable for screen-only viewing but prints fuzzy. 600 DPI doubles the file size with no visible benefit for most documents. Stay at 300 unless your source has unusually fine detail (engineering drawings, dense small print) where 600 might help.

An automatic document feeder (ADF) on a flatbed scanner names pages in scan order automatically, removing the manual sequencing step. If your scanner has an ADF and the document is loose-leaf, use it. If you have to scan one page at a time, save each immediately with a sequential filename so the alphabetical sort in FixTools picks up the right order.

A scan of an A4 page should produce a PDF page sized A4. A scan of a US Letter page should produce US Letter. Mismatched page sizes lead to the PDF rendering at the wrong physical scale when printed, which matters for legal documents intended to substitute for the original.

A 300 DPI A4 JPG scan is typically 2 to 5 MB. A hundred-page document at that resolution is 200 to 500 MB. If this is too large for email or upload, run the JPGs through the FixTools Image Compressor first at quality 75 to 80, which cuts size by half with no visible loss for typed documents.