MS word each page to be converted as .JPEG

cant you not just mark as read only? or save as PDF?

Originally Posted by humdingaling

cant you not just mark as read only? or save as PDF?

Agreed. The process seems pointless given that a PDF would achieve essentially the same outcome, with the advantage of being supported on more platforms than Word files and not prone to the layout changes that affect Word document depending on the printer driver in use.

If someone can see something on-screen they can copy it - especially from a Word document. Furthermore, unless you produce a very poor quality jpg (which no-one would want to read), any semi-decent OCR package can retrieve the text - and the images are already there as images...

Besides which, why would you be concerned with people copying content that is freely available on the net?

The ability to copy something from a file has nothing to do with archiving. What you might need to guard against is archived data being changed, which is an entirely different proposition.

Perhaps, too, you should tell management that one of the implications of their decision is that the imaged files will be far larger than the original documents and, given that the files will just be images, they'll no longer be able to use any tools that search their files for particular kinds of content (e.g. words, phrases, images, tables, etc.) ...

FWIW, Word has a print to fax capability. That will turn any document into a multi-page black/white tiff image file (a format commonly used for archival purposes). As an indication on what happens to the file sizes, I converted a 227-page, 877kb docx via this process and the converted file size was 5801kb - a 6.6x increase. As a PDF (another format commonly used for archival purposes), the same file, with all colour info intact, is only 688kb - nearly a 20% decrease.

Other Word features that also won't work post-conversion include tables of contents, hyperlinks, cross-references, etc.

Still, if that's what your management is wedded to, they should invest in some commercial software designed for the purpose; it's not something they should be expecting people on a user forum to do for free.

PS: PDFs can easily be secured so that they can't be edited or have their content copied (or even printed, if that's what the owner wants), all the while remaining searchable and, therefore fully indexable. For archival purposes, I'd rather such a PDF, at only 12% of the size of the imaged file, any day.