Clean the pages before assembling
Pages photographed under uneven light come out with a grey cast, a shadow down one side and uneven contrast. Fixing each page first is much easier than fixing a finished document, because you can still tell which source image produced which page.
- Crop each image to the page itself, removing the desk, the shadow and any fingers.
- Apply a contrast or clean-scan pass with Document Filter where the photo is dim or flat. For a straightforward grayscale print, the grayscale option is usually the tidiest result.
- Check legibility at 100% zoom — particularly footnotes, stamps and signatures, which are the first things a contrast lift can bury.
- Rotate anything sideways now, while it is still an image; it is far easier than rotating individual PDF pages later.
Order and page
- Lay the pages out in reading order before converting. It sounds obvious, but a set of ten similar-looking scans is remarkably easy to sequence wrongly.
- Convert with Image to PDF or Notes to PDF (which is built for exactly this: one image per page at your chosen paper size, with an optional cleaning pass).
- Choose the paper size you will actually print on, fit mode rather than cover, and a margin — a margin keeps content away from the area many printers cannot reach.
- Flip through the result and confirm the order, then correct any mistakes with Reorder PDF pages.
- If some pages came from an existing PDF rather than an image, join them with Merge PDF, or assemble images and PDFs together with Application Document Pack.
- Re-paginate for the printer with Document Print Prep if the paper size or orientation needs to change.
Making it print well
- **Size the images to the page.** A page image should have enough pixels for the printed size — see pixels, DPI and print size for the arithmetic.
- **Avoid over-compressing.** Text and line work show artefacts early. If the document must be small for emailing, compress less than you would for a photograph.
- **Keep pages uniform.** Mixed page sizes in one document print unpredictably. Re-paginate to one size.
- **Use grayscale deliberately.** For a document going to a mono printer, grayscale output avoids the muddy results colour images produce on a single-tone device.
- **Print a test page first**, then check margins, orientation and readability before running the whole document.
Print at 100% scale with the printer set to actual size. Fit or shrink-to-fit silently rescales the document, which is the single most common reason a printed page comes out a different size from what the PDF promised.
When the document must also be submitted digitally
The same assembled PDF usually serves both purposes, provided the byte size fits the upload limit. If it does not, reduce the embedded images before assembling rather than compressing the finished PDF — see reducing a PDF while preserving readability for the order of operations, and meeting a file size requirement for working inside a stated range.
Common questions
One image per page, or several?
One per page for documents — it keeps each page readable at full size. Several per sheet is for contact sheets and photo prints, where the point is overview rather than reading.
Should I scan at 600 DPI for printing?
Usually not. 300 DPI is the normal quality target for print; 150–200 is acceptable for ordinary text documents. Higher only helps if the content genuinely contains very small detail.
How do I keep the pages in order in a large document?
Number the source images as you capture them, then confirm the sequence from the PDF thumbnails after conversion. Two checks — before and after — cost seconds and prevent most ordering errors.