Need help scanning transcripts

[wannabee]

I know this sounds crazy but I am having a real problem with this.

At least four of my schools require that scanned transcripts be uploaded. The problem is that the schools all have maximum size listed for the files. Some only allow you to upload 500kb per transcript. Others are more generous. My undergrad transcript is 3 pages, however, which doesn't help.

I tried scanning at home on a HP C4280 but couldn't get the size down that far. I even had my computer person come and try to do it and he had no luck. He is taking them home to try and scan them on his computer and printer, as he thinks there could be a problem with my printer.

Any suggestions on getting the size down? We scanned in black and white. Does it make a difference whether you scan an official or unofficial transcript? (We did official.)

Can I take this somewhere to do it quickly? I would gladly pay money. Kinko's no longer exists but has been taken over by FedEx. Thought I would try FedEx tomorrow. Any other ideas?

[LJK]

I was not having luck with my own scanner at home. Luckily I am currently an MS student and have access to the department's copier. The copier is able to make PDFs and email them to you. I didn't even need to make photocopies to get the file size as low as 1mb for 2 pages. My guess is that at a place like FedEx or Staples etc. you will be able to do something similar. Unfortunately using the copier also showed the true background on my official transcript as having giant:

"XXX UNIVERSITY XXX UNIVERSITY

COPY COPY COPY COPY COPY COPY"

repeated across the whole things so its pretty hard to read but I have to send official transcripts anyway so its not too big of a deal.

[fbh]

You might be able to change the quality that your scanner scans at under options of some sort.

I have a simpler option though - Can you access your transcripts online? What I do is go to the online transcript, go to File>Save, then I save it as an HTML and then copy/paste it into a word document and convert it to a pdf. If it looks clean, you might not have to convert it to pdf, but it definitely won't pass your space limit.

If all else fails, take it to FedEx and see what they can do.

[eklavya]

I know this sounds crazy but I am having a real problem with this.

At least four of my schools require that scanned transcripts be uploaded. The problem is that the schools all have maximum size listed for the files. Some only allow you to upload 500kb per transcript. Others are more generous. My undergrad transcript is 3 pages, however, which doesn't help.

I tried scanning at home on a HP C4280 but couldn't get the size down that far. I even had my computer person come and try to do it and he had no luck. He is taking them home to try and scan them on his computer and printer, as he thinks there could be a problem with my printer.

Any suggestions on getting the size down? We scanned in black and white. Does it make a difference whether you scan an official or unofficial transcript? (We did official.)

Can I take this somewhere to do it quickly? I would gladly pay money. Kinko's no longer exists but has been taken over by FedEx. Thought I would try FedEx tomorrow. Any other ideas?

use adobe acrobat professional to do this. if you don't have the program, someone around should have it - parents, profs, university copy center, etc. if no one has it, torrent does

my scanned transcript (4 pgs) was >6mb but allowed size was 800kb. using acrobat, i reduced the size to about 300kb, with no deterioration in quality. good luck

[emmm]

Scanning my transcripts was a major nuisance, and I don't think they're easy to read now that they're all under 500KB. The programs that just wanted official transcripts ended up being much easier.

Good luck!

[csquare]

I know this thread is a couple weeks old but thought this might help anybody still trying to work it out - I have a Canon scanner and was having a similar problem with a file size of 900+ kb for a 3 page PDF, using the "Black and White Document" setting and 200 dpi (which is probably higher resolution than you'd need anyway). I managed to drop the file size significantly (to ~300 kb) by setting the document type to "Text(OCR)" - which probably eliminates a lot of the stuff devoted to white background pixels.

Edited November 29, 2010 by csquare