CompuServe Messages

Hector, If I understand you right, what you want to do is to scan images of these documents, which you can then call up onto the screen. Yes you can do this–there are add-ins to dbase and paradox which will let you index images, plus several packages specifically designed for the job. On the hardware side, you probably do need an optical disk–a group 3 TIFF file at 300 dpi runs about 100k for an 8.5×11 page, so a 512meg R/W optical will take about 5000 pages. There are better compression schemes out there, and you can probably lower the resolution, but if you indeed have 10s of thousands of pages, you're still looking at optical drives. As for the scanner, well, we scan for a living…It sounds like you get a relatively small number of new documents per week, but have an enormous backlog. I would suggest that perhaps you need a light duty scanner for the ongoing work, and then call a service bureau to go through those filing cabinets of backlog. (Or we'll be glad to call you) Frank