I am clunking along reworking all of my forms.

Using my Epson ET-4550 printer in scan mode.

Scanning them in pdf formaty Then I edit them.

I would like to know what number to set the resolution at?

The default is set to 50. Which isn’t even close to clarity needed.

For forms like that, they usually say that in black and white at 200 DPI is fine.

That being said, disk space is cheap these days. I don't think I ever scan anything below 300dpi these days. So, personally, I usually do 300 DPI when scanning signed leases and such.

- John...

If you're planning to email the document's pdf, you can test out the size of a document scanned at 300dpi to make sure that it's less than 10M. If you don't plan to email the document or to share it through some cloud provider, then size is of no matter. I think that going to 600dpi means that it takes a few seconds longer to scan a document, however, you can just test out the quality versus the time it took to scan and then choose the dpi that you find acceptable.

My default is 300. For fine work, I increase the resolution, but for my usual documents (typed B & W, normal sized typeface), 300 is good.

If you are scanning in B&W, that is a reasonable sized file. If you scan in Grayscale or color, leaving the resolution at 300, the size of the file goes up.

I typically use:

normal Color/gray 150dpi, B&W 300dpi

occasionally

better Color/gray 200 dpi, B&W 400dpi

but available are also:

best Color/gray 300dpi, B&W 600dpi and

excellent Color/gray 600dpi, B&W 1200dpi