I am looking for a good solution for black and white documents that have just a little bit of color annotation, such as a colored pen notes, colored stamps, or highlighting. Black and white text images are 5x or 10x smaller, and more legible, than color, but lose the contextual information of the color highlights. (The records I work with are permanent, so we are concerned that they should be in archival formats, legible, and moderate in size. We are using Tiff Group 4, with CCITT T.6 compression.)
Knowing a bare minimum about Tiff file format, I think one should be able to add a layer with just the highlighting or colored text as distinct layers with colors named in their headers. Conceptually, it would be like a Tiff annotation layer, but would be created by the image processing software. The final document would have similar size and legibility as a black and white document.
I imagine that this must be a very common document archiving scenario, but I can't find any mention of this approach anywhere. Can anyone suggest any leads?
Thanks,
Bill Olsen
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