Jane and I have recently taken on custodianship of the training band’s Christmas library. We’ve been given a box of paper copies and a collection of files containing scanned images but the two don’t entirely match up. I’ve been working on the question of how to create scans of what we only have in paper form so that I can email people in the various sections of the band to show them what we will be looking at after half term.

My current technology set up allows me to scan to image files but the composite PDFs I could generate were on the large size. I looked at some online programs to compress them but all the ‘free’ options turned out to require a subscription to download anything… so not what I would define as free! After some fiddling around, I’ve discovered that the best tool I’ve got for compiling images to PDFs is my old MacBook and then I can shrink them down on command line back in Windows (using Ghostscript under the Linux subsystem). The first piece took ages but I’m hoping the second will be much quicker and the band will find the pieces of suitable quality to play from.