I'm a real noob at digital imaging, so please help me out.
I am making photograms by printing real-world objects directly to lithographic film. The resulting photogram can be used as a stencil in manufacturing, and retained as a reference for QC.
I would like to digitize these photograms in such a way that dimensionality is maintained, and I can print copies onto clear sheets. This way, I can send the files overseas, instead of sending physical items. What is an acceptable digital format that will facilitate this kind of life-size printing? PDF? Postscript?
It may be simple to just plop the litho film onto my office's copier/scanner and 'scan as pdf'. Then, if I print the resulting pdf files back to clear film, I assume that the print will be dimensional, to the tolerances of the scanner/copier. Is this a valid assumption? What 'gotchas' might there be? For example, if someone tries to print them onto A4-size clear sheets instead of 8.5x11, I don't want the dimensions to change.
I might wish to do some image processing for contrast, inversion, etc. which might require me to convert the pdf to some more standard image format--I don't know if pdf files can be natively manipulated. In that case, I'm not sure how I can maintain dimensionality such that I can convert back to PDF and maintain scaling. If you were faced with this task, what workflow would you use? Any advice is appreciated.