Comment by codeulike
3 years ago
these are just photos embedded in a PDF, which actually isn't that bad an idea, because it lets you scan multiple pages and join them together as a 'document'
(not sure if the documents in OP had several pages, but if you've scanned/photographed a multi-page document, PDF is not that bad of a solution)
A better option would be to use the TIFF format. You can use it as a container format to store lossless and lossy image formats, and handles multiple images in a single container.
It was the standard for scanners until PDF seemed to dominate the scene.
> It was the standard for scanners until PDF seemed to dominate the scene.
Probably because it's much easier (for average users with few tools and skills) to print a PDF than to print any sort of non-page-based (e.g., image) file format and have the resulting sheet of paper match the scanned sheet of paper in terms of scale, orientation, position -- assuming both sheets are the same dimensions. Essentially using the file as an intermediary for physical copying of standard paper documents.
I can buy the printing argument. The problem with PDF is that this print-optimized is used more and more for purposes where it will never get printed. For example most manuals will never get printed but they are published in PDF format which is a PITA to use on a phone and hard to search.
Except who knows if your application that supports TIFF files actually supports the features you want (multiple images, the compression format, etc)
Reminds me of USB-C.
I'm a teacher in the first year of the university. During the remote classes in the pandemic, we made almost mandatory to upload the photos of the take homes and questions using camscaner [1].
The student just download the app, and it fix the orientation, rotation, bad light, contrast, and many other horrible things that a jpg may have. In particular the orientation and ordering multiple sheets. Also, Moodle has a little more support for pdf than jpg [2].
I don't know how many three letter agencies are reading the stream, but I'm happy that many three letter agencies operative now have a better formation in algebra and calculus.
[1] https://www.camscanner.com/
[2] It depends on how many optional packages your sysadmin installed.