How To Email Articles To Another Member?

[kelticwizard]

I have two articles to Email to another DIYer.

My question is, how do I do it?

Do I save the scans in TIFF? Microsoft Word?

How do I go about this?

My scanner has a Twain interface which I generally send to XnView, a freeware imaging program similar to Microsft's only more versatile. Where do I go to get these things into his Email?

PS: I use webmail. I don't have Outlook Express hooked up. Afraid of viruses.

[planet10]

Originally posted by kelticwizard
Do I save the scans in TIFF? Microsoft Word?

Doing it as Word assumes the other has Word (and acts as a potential vector for viruses. I scan into tiffs, make a PageMaker Doc and then write out a pdf... but i have all the cool software to do that.

PS: I use webmail. I don't have Outlook Express hooked up. Afraid of viruses.

Outlook isn't the only email program. Try Eudora.

dave

[fdegrove]

Hi,

Assuming you have a printed article scanned in a format such as *.TIF, you're likely to end up with a file that is too big to mail.

In order to reduce its' size to more manageable proportions the file has to be converted to a more compressed,more lossy format such as *.JPG or *.GIF.
You may need an external program for that in case the soft that came with your scanner doesn't have this capabiliy.

Having done that it will still be an image on which you will not be able to edit any text.

If you need to do that, the text has to be converted via a filtering program capable of optical character recognition,AKA OCR.
These allow to export to the most common Mickeysoft text extensions such as *.TXT,*.RTF,*.DOC. and with some plugin help possibly to other formats as well.

In case it needs to be universally readable, cross platform in computor speak,you'll need Adobe's Acrobat Writer which can convert it to the *.PDF extension.
Quite often this results in the smallest document size, hence easier and faster to mail.
Moeover the reader is freely available from Adobe's website,so anyone with access to the net can install it.

PS: I use webmail. I don't have Outlook Express hooked up. Afraid of viruses.

Unless the company hosting your webmail runs an anti-virus scan on all incoming mail, this is a false security.
Just imagine you open an attachment in your mail and decide to safe on your local disk....bingo,the virus is in.

Whether you use Outlook Express or any other e-mail program doesn't diminish your risk,nor does it augment it.

Most of my e-mail goes through my hotmail account,a web based mailclient, and is protected on their expense by McAfee's ant-virus software.

Also,Outlook Express can be configured in such away that it doesn't allow you to open any attachments from within the program.
Pretty safe if you ask me...

I use this setup for years and never had a virus since.
Naturally anti-virus soft needs to be kept up to date and in my case (I am online as soon as I log on to the pc) , the software checks for update in the background automatically.

Now,if you have OE installed,just write your e-mail message from within that program and from the menu-bar choose the attach button.
This allows you to search for your file on your disk and attach it.
That's it.

Cheers,

[jackinnj]

I do some editing -- the kind with diacritical marks for bold, italic, insertion, punctuation, etc., -- I scan the article -- I have BW Document setting for the Epson Scanner -- 96 dpi for an 8.5 X 11 sheet (almost A4) then use Photoshop "Save for Web" to convert to a GIF or JPG. This compresses the BMP quite dramatically.

[Christer]

Don't use jpeg for text and graphical material if you can avoid it.
Jpeg is optimized for compressing photos where you want to
preserve smoothness. Graphical material becomes blurry with
jpeg. GIF on the other hand is optimized for graphical material
and is to be preferred. The exception would be if the article
contains photos and it good reproduction of these is higher
priority than good reproduction of text, drawings etc. The
problem with GIF is that it is patented so many programs
cannot save images as GIF files. If I remember correctly
MSPaint will save bitmaps as GIF files though, so it should be
no problem if you run Windows.

An alternative is to compress the bitmaps to zip or gzip files,
but they will probably be bigger than GIF files.

[fdegrove]

Hi,

If I remember correctly

In fact MS Paint does that, just one thing...it doesn't offer support for the *.TIF format, which often means going from *.TIF to *.BMP and so on.

BTW,*.GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format".
I find it best suited for B&W though,low bitrate images turn out fine too.

An alternative is to compress the bitmaps to zip or gzip files,

In this case the adresse needs a program to decompress the format.

Ciao,

[mikek]

use pdf995....locate by using google...download...follow instructions...should be able to create pdfs' for free...

[planet10]

Originally posted by fdegrove
*.TIF... to a more compressed,more lossy format such as *.JPG or *.GIF.

GIF is not a lossy file format. A TIFF file saved with the standard LZR compression is not much bigger than a gif as long as you make sure you are starting with the same bit depth.

A further trick to make gifs smaller is to reduce their bit-depth. 2 bits (4 greys) is usually sufficient for text. Drawings can often be 1 bit (B&W).

you'll need Adobe's Acrobat Writer which can convert it to the *.PDF extension.

Or Mac OS X which uses pdf as its native graphics file format (and screen rendering). All you do is print the file to a pdf.

Originally posted by mikek
use pdf995....locate by using google...download...follow instructions...should be able to create pdfs' for free...

Adobe's site also has some limited on-line pdf creation tools.

dave

[kelticwizard]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

The articles and graphics are of course in B&W.

I have OCR software from my scanner, but I have never used it and I don't want to mess around with it tonight.

My scanner is not completely satisfactory. It delivers a small strip in the middle of the page where text and image disappear. However, when I switch my Twain interface from B&W to greyscale, a smudgy, but still readable text reappears. I wonder if that is because of minimal memory, (32 MB), or the fact that the scanner is Parallel Port instead of USB. Or maybe $38 mail order scanners are not very good, (though I ordered a $42 USB scanner for a friend and it works like a million bucks).

At any rate, I think I will scan in grey scale, save it in GIF, and send the article as attachments. GIF seems to have very small file sizes, if the sizes for graphics I upload to this forum are any indication. If the member has trouble with the GIF, I will just tell him to download the program I used to convert the image to GIF, which is XnView. Freeware. Sound like a plan?

Now the next question: Can I use the DIYAudio mail system to do this? Are there provisions for attachments, or will I have to use my own Email to send these images?

Thank you everyone for all your help so far.

[fdegrove]

Hi,

Can I use the DIYAudio mail system to do this?

No,not to my knowledge anyway.

One workaround: sent an email from the forum to your recipient and you'll get his private e-mail adress.
That way you can communicate in private.

Cheers,