"Roger Donne" <roger@donne.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message news:13hm59er1lgqv89@corp.supernews.com... > Any recommendations or comments on software packages for scanning paper > documents and managing the resulting files? I'm looking for something > which will scan to a format like pdf. Subsequently I would like to > combine the files with other digital image files in a variety of formats > and organise the lot into a database which would be easy to search or > retrieve from. I do have genealogical software which allows images to be > associated with people and events in the database, but I was looking for > something separate to this. > Regards: Roger Donne > Thanks to all who replied. Xnview plus Picasa seems to be a good combination to try, particularly since it's free! It does mean restricting the scanned image formats to those which Picasa supports. That means scanning documents to tif as opposed to the pdf format which I had in mind. Still, with Xnview I could convert files to pdf at a later date if I change my mind. There does seem to be an impact in terms of the storage requirement. As a test, I tried scanning a single A4 sheet of typescript with Xnview at 300dpi and saving the result as a pdf and a tif. The tif was about 50% larger than the pdf file (25MB as opposed to 16MB) with no difference in quality of the image as far as I could see. Regards: Roger Donne