LaserSoft Imaging

I know this is simple, however I would like to scan b&w text documents to be downloaded so quality and file size are concerns. What settings in silverfast ai should I use? Thanks in advance.

Dear Scan-Man

SilverFast does allow to scan in greyscale as well as line art. Depending on the quality of your original material and especially the contrast of text to background each of these modes may be a valid choice.
Of course black-and-white (1 bit) scans generate smaller files, though. But a greyscale may get you better subjective results at a lower resolution and thus might also reduce file size somewhat.

The lights-shadow-pipette tool probably is a great tool for efficiently removing greyish backgrounds in greyscale text scans.
SRD could be helpful if you want to remove dots that might irritiate an OCR programme.
The gradation tool is perhaps experience to be the most important tool for your purposes.

The decision of the output medium seems important to me, too. If you want to be able to print the text scans later on, you need a higher resolution than just for archiving and reading on a computer monitor.

And these considerations are just a start. As you can see, your question turns out not to be answerable with a simple set of some scanning parameter values, but needs some thinking about want source material you want to scan and for what purpose you will scan it, and what kind of reduction in quality you will find acceptable.

Thanks for responding. I am trying to scan an employment application that is printed on creme colored or off-white paper with black ink.