Printing & scanning
The format is forgiving, but a good print and a good scan leave all the error correction in reserve for the damage that years of storage bring.
Printing
Section titled “Printing”- Use a laser printer if you can. Toner is stable and does not bleed. Inkjet works too — choose Inkjet as the printer type and Pabaru uses coarser dots — but check that your ink is not water-soluble if the pages might get wet.
- Print at 100 %. Choose Actual size, 100 % or No scaling in the print dialog — never Fit to page. The dot pitch must match what Pabaru wrote into the PDF.
- Turn off “toner saving”, draft modes and image enhancement.
- Paper: ordinary office paper is fine; acid-free or archival paper lasts longer.
- Print more than one copy and keep them in different places. Restoring can combine pages from several copies.
Scanning
Section titled “Scanning”- Greyscale, not black-and-white: Pabaru uses the grey levels to decide uncertain dots.
- Resolution: at least 3× the dot density. For 200 dpi dots, scan at 600 dpi or more; for 100 dpi dots, 300 dpi is enough. The page header and the app tell you the dot density.
- No sharpening, no “text enhancement”, no descreening. Turn off automatic image processing.
- Use the optical resolution of your scanner, not an interpolated one.
- Lossless formats are best (PNG or TIFF). JPEG at high quality works as well, and so does the PDF your scanner produces.
- Orientation and order do not matter, and the page does not need to be perfectly straight.
Before you put the pages away
Section titled “Before you put the pages away”Scan the fresh print once and run a restore (or just pabaru inspect on
each page). If every page reads cleanly, your printer–paper–scanner chain is fine.
Without a printer, pabaru verify simulates printing and scanning,
including crumpled and torn paper and lost pages.