Yeah, the whole “faithful” copy thing is a bit of a joke. The scanner is just a machine that turns paper into pixels; it can’t keep the exact weave of the paper, the way ink settles, or the faint ghost of a smudge. Every time you compress, colour‑correct, or crop, you’re already nudging the data away from the source. So you end up with a representation that’s *close enough* but not identical. It’s the only way to share those pages without handling the fragile originals, but if you truly want to preserve every nuance, you have to live with the fact that the original will always be the only perfect copy. If you need to keep that texture, high‑resolution multispectral imaging and a robust archival workflow are your best bets, but the paradox stays.