Electronic Document Upload Guide
Please follow this guide to formatting electronic documents for upload using UNE's online systems. There are three steps to converting paper documents into electronic documents:
- Scan the document and save as image files.
- Reduce the size of the images and convert to GIF.
- Combine images of the one document into one file (either DOC or PDF).
1. Scanning
When you scan your document you do not need to do this at a high resolution. Normally 700 x 1000 pixels at 72dpi (dots per inch) is more than sufficient for a copy that can easily be read on a standard computer screen.
If the document has a background or some other artefact which makes it difficult to read the text, it can be scanned at a much higher resolution but then the file size must be reduced before you upload it.
2. Size reduction
There are a lot of software applications (often free) which are available on the internet for all computer platforms that can resize images and save them in different formats. For example, if you are using the Microsoft Windows platform then a highly recommended free image viewer is Irfanview.
Open your scanned image, find the "Resize" option (may be under the Edit or Image menu) and set the new size to approximately 700 high and 1000 high, and reduce the DPI if it over 150. If you scanned the document upside-down, please use the "Rotate" option to display the image the correct way.
Save your image as a GIF file. The GIF file type is an image compression format and can store the image information using a much smaller amount of space (often less than 100kb) than JPG or BMP while keeping the document text highly readable.
3. Combining pages into one document
The easiest way to combine the page images into one file is to put them in a word processing application such as Microsoft Word, Word:mac or OpenOffice Writer either by copying and pasting the images or using the "Insert" menu option. Please put one image to a page in the correct order, then save the document and upload it only either left in the DOC format or converted to PDF (usually you can "print" to PDF otherwise there are free doc-to-PDF converters available on the internet).
Another way is to convert the images to PDFs and then combine them into one PDF (again, there are free or try-before-you-buy software that can do this which you can find on the internet).
You can still upload the GIF images individually, however this makes it difficult for our Admissions staff to process your application especially when there are many different types of documents you need to supply (e.g. academic transcript, profession registration, additional forms). Hence we request that you submit one file for each type of document you need to provide.
There exists limits to the size of each document that you can upload and you should aim for a maximum of 500kb per document (a 5-page document of scanned GIF images should be around 400kb).