Scanner
Chris
At work we have a whizzy photocopier that is on the network which you load
the document feeder of, and 2 minutes later all the docs are in a shared
network place as PDFs, but I suspect that this machine is not cheap :-(
I have been looking at these printer/scanner combo's that are about £150,
but the scan function always seems to be as a flatbed scanner, and I'll bet
the scan arrives as a graphics file, rather than a PDF, and that you have to
use some cumbersome GUI on the host PC every time you want to do a scan,
which would be become annoying quite quickly...
Anyone got any ideas?
Cheers
Chris
Rob
> the scan arrives as a graphics file, rather than a PDF,
That's quite likely. But what you'll find is that in most cases any pdf
from a scan is simply a set of compressed image files amalgamated
together. The default for PDF (IIRC) is to make a JPEG file for a
bitmapped piece of data (such as a scan), so PDF is just a graphics file
format in this respect. If you're only interested in single page
documents, you'd be better off just storing image files of the pages in
your preferred format.
If you're interested in multi-page documents, a PDF will store the
images in a single file, indexed by page. Generating the PDF directly
from the scan is probably not directly supported by the apps that come
with the scanner (one exception might be canon). Off the top of my
head, you could do it by any of the following:
1) If you're using linux, it's a straightforward task to write a script
which will scan an image and then use 'convert' to turn it into a PDF
2) Similarly, you could try to find some way of using 'convert' under
windows in a script (imagemagick.org).
3) Look for a third party program that will do it for you (probably not
free). Search on google for "scan to pdf" or similar - scan2pdf,
konvert etc.
4) If using windows, you could get a PDF printer driver (i.e. any print
attempt to the virtual printer results in the creation of a PDF). Then
use the "scan to printer" or "photocopy" function of all cheap scanners
to automatically create a PDF. This is simple and free.
Those all-in-one devces probably do have PDF functionality though (?).
But if you don't need the other functions, it's a more expensive route.
HTH.
Rob.
Tim Green
> I am looking for a cheap and fast way of scanning documents to PDF.
Buy Adobe's PDF software.
Oh, you said cheap.
--
To email me, please remove the lime from the tin first.
Value of 2p or 2cent comments may go up as well as down.
Steve Slatcher
> I am looking for a cheap and fast way of scanning documents to PDF.
Check with webmaster for the Hutton Enquiry. They seem to have done a good
job scanning-in printed-out emails for PDF. They must have done that fast,
if not cheaply.
Paul Rudin
> They seem to have done a good job scanning-in printed-out emails
> for PDF.
The obvious question being: why bother printing them out in the first
place?
Steve Slatcher
It is not clear to me who originally printed them. Maybe the original
recipient had them printed so he could scribble incriminating comments in
the margin?
Mark Ayliffe
Rob <r_h...@hotmail.com> illuminated us with:
>> but the scan function always seems to be as a flatbed scanner, and I'll bet
>> the scan arrives as a graphics file, rather than a PDF,
>
> That's quite likely. But what you'll find is that in most cases any pdf
> from a scan is simply a set of compressed image files amalgamated
> together.
This will be true of the cheaper solutions (such as for example doing it in
OpenOffice). We have Adobe Capture here which works as the OP described
though we use a sheetfed HP flatbed scanner. It _can_ just embed the image
in the PDF, or do an OCR job on it with varying results depending on the
original quality (of course). The OCR operation is charged per squillion
copies and policed with a dongle (squillion is around 30k IIRC in this
context). That is the expensive bit, but it seems non-optional. You can feed
large numbers of large documents through the system quite quickly & it all
gets processed through a number of queues (OCR, make a page, put pages
together into document etc.)
Of course a full copy of Adobe Acrobat will do the OCR as well. One docuemnt
at a time.
--
Mark
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