Making PDF files from original printed copy

1. Scan the document/figure in at highest possible resolution on the scanner. This will produce a rather large tif file.
2. Load the tif file into Photoshop (available on the Mac the scanner is connected to). In Photoshop the image can by cropped (usually necessary to fit the scanner output on a regular size 8 1/2 x 11 page) and then stored as an eps file.
3. The eps file itself is pretty good, but further improvement results from converting the eps file into a pdf file in Acrobat Distiller. I have Distiller on my home PC, I don't know if it's available in the physics dept.

I followed these steps to scan in the supplemental letters for my NSF proposal, and they are very legible. Using xv to convert from tif to eps with the same starting tif files produced random dots where there were supposed to be letters. I've attached one of the resulting pdf iles as an example of the quality possible with this approach.