hupjack

So I just had a prospective employer ask for a soft doc of my transcript
from college. All I had was hard copies, so I figured I'd scan it and
e-mail it to him.

It's 2 pages, and I'd prefer to e-mail it as a single 2-page pdf.

I don't own Adobe Acrobat, which I presume would do this quite well.

I scanned both pages in as "mixed text and images" on my HP G85, and
used the scanning software to automatically throw the images into an MS
Word document.

On either my mac or PC at that point, I have the ability to print to
PDF, but this wasn't ideal for two reasons.

The resulting PDF file size was too large for my liking.
got it down to 3MB on my mac, which wasn't bad, using the "compress to
pdf" feature. No clue what sorta compression it applied to the
pictures, but it worked out decently.
http://www.macworld.com/2005/09/feat...ips1/index.php

At 3MB, I would have been happy enough, but my biggest complaint with
the resulting pdf was that ms word introduced white margins around what
was a scan of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. You can zoom in and see what
you need to see, but I'd rather the resulting pdf display nicely when
viewed at 100% and not have such large margins. Is there any way to
avoid these margins that are introduced when I use MS Word as an
intermediate step?

Is there another recommendable way to do what I'm trying to do here
without forking over cash for new SW? On the PC side, I already use
ghostscript and such for printing to PDF, and on the mac there are all
sorts of PDF related printing tools built into tiger.

I could print to pdf straight from a picture file viewed in "preview",
and that would take care of the border problem, but going that route, I
don't know how I'd combine both pictures into a single 2-page pdf.

thanks in advance for any insight you can offer
hupjack