So I just had a prospective employer ask for a soft doc of my transcript 
from college.  All I had was hard copies, so I figured I'd scan it and 
e-mail it to him.

It's 2 pages, and I'd prefer to e-mail it as a single 2-page pdf.

I don't own Adobe Acrobat, which I presume would do this quite well.

I scanned both pages in as "mixed text and images" on my HP G85, and 
used the scanning software to automatically throw the images into an MS 
Word document.

On either my mac or PC at that point, I have the ability to print to 
PDF, but this wasn't ideal for two reasons.

The resulting PDF file size was too large for my liking.
got it down to 3MB on my mac, which wasn't bad, using the "compress to 
pdf" feature.  No clue what sorta compression it applied to the 
pictures, but it worked out decently.
http://www.macworld.com/2005/09/features/tigertips1/index.php

At 3MB, I would have been happy enough, but my biggest complaint with 
the resulting pdf was that ms word introduced white margins around what 
was a scan of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.  You can zoom in and see what 
you need to see, but I'd rather the resulting pdf display nicely when 
viewed at 100% and not have such large margins.  Is there any way to 
avoid these margins that are introduced when I use MS Word as an 
intermediate step?

Is there another recommendable way to do what I'm trying to do here 
without forking over cash for new SW?  On the PC side, I already use 
ghostscript and such for printing to PDF, and on the mac there are all 
sorts of PDF related printing tools built into tiger.

I could print to pdf straight from a picture file viewed in "preview", 
and that would take care of the border problem, but going that route, I 
don't know how I'd combine both pictures into a single 2-page pdf.

thanks in advance for any insight you can offer
hupjack

hupjack wrote:

> Is there another recommendable way to do what I'm trying to do here 
> without forking over cash for new SW?  On the PC side, I already use 
> ghostscript and such for printing to PDF, and on the mac there are all 
> sorts of PDF related printing tools built into tiger.

If you have a Java Runtime Environment on your machine,
then you can start the following Java WebStart application:
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/itext.jnlp

It has a tool to concatenate 2 existing PDF files:
Manipulate->Concat

> I could print to pdf straight from a picture file viewed in "preview", 
> and that would take care of the border problem, but going that route, I 
> don't know how I'd combine both pictures into a single 2-page pdf.

If your originating documents are images (tiff, gif,...),
you can also try Convert2Pdf->PhotoAlbum
Just put all the images you want to combine in a
directory and pass the path to this directory as
an argument. All images will be inserted into a
PDF file.

br,
Bruno

thanks Bruno...  I'll check out that java tool..

I figured out how to do a better job with my intermediary ms word 
step....  If I shrunk down the borders in MS word page setup BEFORE 
dropping the photos into the document, then MS word allows the photos to 
fill the workspace, and doesn't pad the photos with borders..

I'm curious as to what sort of resolution people use for an 8.5 x 11 
scan so as to be perfectly legible but trying to keep the pdf size down.

any resolution guidelines / suggestions?

-hupjack