🚀 go-pugleaf

> even at 300-600 dpi the text looks crummy.

That partly, on screen, because scanned text will always look crummy
compared to real fonts.  

But I shudder at the thought that you were thinking of a 300 dpi (or
even 600 dpi) colour scan for the web. Let's do some calculations.

8.5 x 11 inches at 300 dpi full colour is 8.5 x 11 x 300 x 300 =
8415000 pixels, or 25245000 bytes - around 24 megabytes. 600 dpi is
four times that, around 96 megabytes!  Even with compression this is
just astronomical for a web site.  And high compression will use JPEG
which ruins text even more.

Go down to a very small resolution.  Consider scanning the background
and blocking out areas in InDesign, XPress or whatever to add text on
a plain white background.
>
>If I go the jpg/gif route, should I scan that at 72-96 dpi and then post it directly? Will I still run into the problem of poor text reproduction?

Yes, but GIF will probably give the sharpest reproduction in most
cases. But it will be big. Don't think of your resolution, think of
the size in pixels; if its more than 600 pixels wide, it's too big for
a web page.

People in general DO NOT take full page magazine ads and put them on
the web. How many have you seen...?

Aandi Inston