Recommend scanning software?

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I’m not satisfied with the scanning software that came with Canon Scanner LiDE 210; is there any better software available that won’t break the bank? Thanks.

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A few freeware options to look at: Snapfiles and FreewareFiles.

Depending on what you find dissatisfying in the Cannon software, these may or may not be any better; but perhaps worth a browse?

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I agree, CanoScan’s MP navigator does leave much to be desired.
Please post back if you have found and tested a worthy candidate, as I would be interested in a replacement too.

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PaperPort was pretty good software when my wife & I used to use it.
See the link as it is now $99.00 used to come bundled with Visioneer scanners.:cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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RG I also liked PaperPort in it’s old iteration, but now, it came bundled with my Brother mfc, and it is AWFUL I am using Irfan Viewer mostly now but haven’t scanned to it yet. Not sure if it will even work well so I am interested in the conclusion that may be reached here. Current paperport actually creates a folder for EVERY scan. no matter what I did, so I abandoned it still looking for something better.
Joel

Joel

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I have had Paperport for years…
I don’t use it much anymore but it is s good program with a lot of features.

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Price? Price? Who ever buys software?
The best software in the world is FREE.
“Ve don’ buy no stinkin’ software!” Author, Old Serbian

I use only Epson scanners (I have three) but I never use the software that comes with any scanner.
I think it actually did install with the printer drivers.

If I want to scan a document, I can use my Word Processor to ‘Acquire the image’ and if it’s a graphic image, photograph, etc., I use my Graphics program (Photo Filtre) to ‘Acquire’ the image from the scanner. Voila!—no need to ever run scanner software.

I’ve shown many of my customers how to do that and they mostly LOVE it.
I also share the free program, “Photo Filtre” with them and they love that one too.
Doing a screen save or screen print is as easy as 1,2,3.

Happy Holidays Everyone!
The Doctor 😎

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Hamrick Software has the best scanner software on the market. While DrWho is also making a good recommendation for the average user, VueScan is the defacto standard in graphics shops that have to do lots of high resolution photo scanning. For example the Professional edition can write RAW DNG files. Personally I don’t use it because my scanning needs are are light and are handled fine by the software that came with my scanner. But I have played with the eval and its excellent.

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Since I posted the question I have read that acquiring software other than what came with the scanner will not improve the quality of the scan. True or false?
The OCR software with Canon LiDE 210 is wretched. Any suggestions for software compatible with the 210 that might do a better job?

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As much as I hate to admit it on a Windows forum, but xsane on Linux is about as fully featured and controllable scanning application that you could want, including gamma, HSV and colour correction, full control over quality etc. If only Windows had something that came even close for all scanners.

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I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Scannito Pro. This is lovely software and does everything you could want it to.

I also found the software that came with my Canon scanner was hopeless. I like to be able to preview a scan, crop it and then scan into a specified folder. I looked around for freeware that would let me do this without hassles but couldn’t find any. So I tried three commercial programs and settled on Scannito Pro, which is brilliant: it loads quickly, is easy to use and has some nice features. And it’s not costly, only about $25 for a full licence.

I would recommend it to anyone.

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I downloaded the trial version of Scanitto Pro and found it much better than the Canon stuff and have decided to keep it. Thanks for the tip.

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Thunderbill,
VueScan 9 may be all that you need.

I am not sure of its quality but VueScan 9 includes ocr.
Download the trial and try it on your documents.

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Since I posted the question I have read that acquiring software other than what came with the scanner will not improve the quality of the scan. True or false?

Depends on what you actually mean when you say “the scan”. The scan process itself is hardware – if it’s no good, it’s no good, nothing you can do about it. Some scanners have settings that can be tweaked to change the scan process for different subject types, some software will know how to do this, some won’t, but the actual scan itself is pretty fixed, true. Most scanning software actually gets the scan exactly the same way using the same drivers as the “acquire image” options talked about above do, there’s no difference.

However, some “scanning software” is actually doing after scan processing to the image as well. If that’s what you mean, then that part is software dependent, and the software you use will affect the result.

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Hamerick’s VueScan saved me a bundle when Cannon had no software or drivers for my Cannon LiDE 30, to help me when I migrated to Windows 7 (64 bit). However, VueScan had no difficulty recognizing and using the the LiDE 30. Check their web site; it looks as if their software will run on a couple of hundred different scanners.

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I have a monster project. There is about 30,000 pages of genealogy notes.Copy of pages originally hand written 1900-1955
Copy done in early 80’s Pages still quite readable
Paper slightly discolored from age

From what I read in this thread, there’s a lot of great knowledge and experience with scanners here. And I do need some advice.

Below is a short write-up of what I believe I need in scanner software. I curently have an HP PSC 950 all-in-one and I have a system with WindowsME, another with WindowsXP, another with Vista and this system with Windows7.

The operation that I envision is scan a page, add descriptions to be indexed and page number for a second index. Edit out black left by copy machine, add some text, save the document and continue thru 30,000 pages.

With your knowledge, can you suggest a package that seems to give me what I list below? And if you know a scanner particularly good with this type of input, I’d like to hear about that.

When a scan session is started, enter the beginning page number and allow user to display that record and then continue displaying next, previous or by page number. If the intended page does not exist, allow the user to specify a page number or go into scan/edit.

Need to scan a page and display it, display page number index, allow entry of one to 5 description lines and each line is a single entry to a description index. Do not index blank description lines. Input page is 8.5″ wide by 11″ top to bottom. Must be able to crop and move selected areas (including descriptions, page number, any thing added and any scanned information) to a different location. Recorded image display format is scanned page followed by about .5 inch blank line followed by 1st line of description leftmost and page number and alpha suffix about .5 inch from right-most margin and then up to 4 lines of description.

Page number is 5 digits which will increment by 1 after each page is saved. A few pages will have in the 6th position (right most) an alpha character suffix entered by person doing the scan. Must be able to change the page number before the scan is saved and the entered page number will be incremented by 1 as the page is saved.

Need the ability to mouse a square or oblong of any size and have it cleared and then I can enter text or leave it blank. Need the background cleaned up a bit and approval for each place. Must be able to select an area and have the program sharpen all characters, shapes, etc within the selected area.

Need the ability to delete a page with it’s changes and re-scan so that editing can be redone.

Color and OCR not used in this project.

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When I moved to W7 my old scanning software wouldn’t work and there wasn’t an obvious replacement.

As I generally just scan documents for storage I tried the Windows Fax and Scan built in software. Works fine for basic print scanning and offers basic stuff to adjust settings etc with the Preview command.

Not sure if anything similar is in older Windows versions.

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I’m not satisfied with the scanning software that came with Canon Scanner LiDE 210; is there any better software available that won’t break the bank? Thanks.

There is no scanning software.

There’s just:
1. scanner hardware drivers
2. a TWAIN interface

Then there are applications – graphics software, OCR tools, word processors, graphics to pdf converters, etc. – that can communicate with the TWAIN interface and thus use the scanner.

The quality of scanning jobs depends on the instructions you gave to the TWAIN interface. For best results you need to address the TWAIN interface in “advanced mode” to fine-tune the commands sent to the scanner.

You need to know the correct TWAIN settings to reach the optimal result you’re aiming for. And there is the rub. Every different kind of scan job requires different settings.

Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, publishes the best and most exhaustive free tutorial I’ve ever seen.

There is a ‘tutorial_English.pdf’ downloadable, but the online version is better because of the interactive nature of the reality checks.

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I use ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Sprint as the OCR software on my Epson scanner and found it very good. It came bundled with the scanner so I don’t know what it would cost. Years ago I got ABBYY FineReader 4.0 on the free CD with PC Pro magazine which I have also used with Win 7 and it still works OK so you might be able to still get it for free

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I am surprised no one has mentioned a totally free program for personal use called Irfan View. I have a Brother multifunction printer with scanner and I decided I did not like the included scanner software, including the cumbersome Paperport, so I went to Irfan View. Just clicking on the icon opens a blank window, go to the end of the file drop down and click on acquire batch scanning, and click on ok on the next small window. From there you can set whatever properties you want (or just use the default properties) and do a pre-scan to change your image boundaries and then run a scan. Save it wherever you want by using file – save as … , and you are done.

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I am surprised no one has mentioned a totally free program for personal use called Irfan View. I have a Brother multifunction printer with scanner and I decided I did not like the included scanner software, including the cumbersome Paperport, so I went to Irfan View. Just clicking on the icon opens a blank window, go to the end of the file drop down and click on acquire batch scanning, and click on ok on the next small window. From there you can set whatever properties you want (or just use the default properties) and do a pre-scan to change your image boundaries and then run a scan. Save it wherever you want by using file – save as … , and you are done.

X2! Though my needs are not extensive, I use IrfanView with a Brother MFC with excellent results.

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I have the CanonScan 9000F and use the included scanner interface all the time. In this case I usually use the scanner software directly and not Canon MP Naviagator. Using the Advanced tab here give me far more options than any third party interface. If accurate (or reasonably so) OCR is what you require, the Nuance’s OmniPage Pro would likely be your best bet.

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I have an older Epson scanner and when I moved to Win7 there were no drivers for it. So I too, got Hamrick’s VueScan software. I bought the professional version and like it very much. Works great!

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I had the same problem, tried Scanitto, too difficult and user unfriendly, tried some other free offerings but the best most user friendly and really useful was Vuescan by Hamrick software. Easy mode is fine for most but if you like to tinker or if you scan multiple pages for the same Doc, then this is for you. It has an option to scan multiple and save them to a single scan which i then save to pdf or whatever. The regular vs is well worth the 39 $ and the Pro vs is really feature packed but most of us wont need and 80$ scanner package. Up to vs 9 now but I still use 8 and its all I need. Vuescan supply’s all the drivers you need and covers all the major and most of the minor makers of scanners
sj

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I have an older Epson scanner and when I moved to Win7 there were no drivers for it. So I too, got Hamrick’s VueScan software. I bought the professional version and like it very much. Works great!

Did the Hamrick software include the drivers? Without drivers none of the software would work.

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I have been looking for some software for scanning various documents into PDF format and was delighted to find nitro PDF Pro 6 free on this months PC Pro cover CD. It has good reviews and I have been very impressed with it so far (I’m not easily impressed). Definitely worth a look. It’s quite powerful and uses the latest ribbon style toolbars so as you would guess it is designed to integrate well with Office.

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I am wanting to scan both photos and documents to CD in order to create a searchable database not subject to the same sorts of deterioration
over time that paper suffers. There is not an insurmountable amount, but still there is quite a bit, and the ability to have the photos in pretty
good shape would be good, efficiency would be good, cheap would be good, but from my perspective, compatibility with multiple computers is
required, so that either the requisite software could be resident on the CD or they would already had the requisite software on their computer
just because it’s a PC to access the information. I have a pretty good free data base manager that I could use to file the stuff, but what do I want to create a photo image that others can acquire from the disc and edit in their own software if they desire. I am using a Canon Pixma MFP
and not liking the Navigator much either.

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I am surprised no one has mentioned a totally free program for personal use called Irfan View. I have a Brother multifunction printer with scanner and I decided I did not like the included scanner software, including the cumbersome Paperport, so I went to Irfan View. Just clicking on the icon opens a blank window, go to the end of the file drop down and click on acquire batch scanning, and click on ok on the next small window. From there you can set whatever properties you want (or just use the default properties) and do a pre-scan to change your image boundaries and then run a scan. Save it wherever you want by using file – save as … , and you are done.

I know I am replying to an old post. I tried to download the Irfan program. It hung up and for the last 10 or 12 minutes, it will not finish downloading or will it allow me to delete the program. I will probably just shut down the computer and see if that will kill of the program. Does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about Irfam.

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I know I am replying to an old post. I tried to download the Irfan program. It hung up and for the last 10 or 12 minutes, it will not finish downloading or will it allow me to delete the program. I will probably just shut down the computer and see if that will kill of the program. Does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about Irfam.

Shutting down the computer did remove the Irfan program. I then downloaded the program again. The problem I am having is I cannot put the image (text, no pictures) in the file I want. I can find the file, but I cannot highlight the file. I do not want to have to start the file system all over. In fact, I cannot figure how to make and open a new file.

I have downloaded and tried all of the programs others have mentioned. Not one of the programs will allow me to scan to my existing files. I can find them, in the new program, but cannot use them. I may have to continue used Nuance. Unfortunatly, there seems to be no way to contact them unless I buy another program. I would pay for advice if the advice would fix the problems I have with Nuance.

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Pericolosco persuaded me to raise the dead here….

There is no scanning software.

There’s just:
1. scanner hardware drivers
2. a TWAIN interface

There is no TWAIN interface.
There’s just 0’s and 1’s

The key here is to know when 0 comes before 1. i.e:
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000001 01110011 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110100 00101110

Then you can comunicate with the hardware.

I prefer vue scan : https://www.hamrick.com/

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Pericolosco persuaded me to raise the dead here….
…There is no TWAIN interface…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWAIN

Have you been leaning out of windows? (see Pericolosco’s signature).

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I’m not satisfied with the scanning software that came with Canon Scanner LiDE 210; is there any better software available that won’t break the bank? Thanks.

Vuescan is far and away the best scanner software out there. I have been using it with my canon printers for years.
Version 8 I reckon is the pick of the bunch. The address is http://www.hamrick.com They also make a great graphics file viewer/editor/print in viewprint pro 32.
I have used vueprint since the days of windows 3.1 and it works just as well in windows 7 32 and 64. The best software investment I have ever made.

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I have found this thread interesting. I too am looking for software for a particular project I’m facing in the new year. I need something that will read documents that have columns, newspaper, telephone book, that I am able to manipulate in Word or Excel. Any thoughts about something that would work for me with this?

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I think there are two issues here.
1. Scanning which I have covered with vuescan, and
2. OCR to convert the scanned image to typically an editable Word, Wordperfect, or Excel document.

Abby works very well for me as OCR for word processing, and I have every reason to believe it works just as well for Excel.

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TextBridge Pro Millennium works for me on XP and windoze7. It does for me what you have described.

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The S/W which came with my Canon D1250 is also unusable. It is, in fact some of the most impenetrable crap I have ever seen. The Kodak scanner package which was included with Windows up thru W2000 and was dropped from XP works OK. They called their S/W “Imagevue”, and the main executable is “Kodakimg.exe”. I found a place to download it, you should be able to find it by googling those filenames.

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Like vandamme, I have an HP scanner and the software that came with it was over complex and bloated with excess stuff I did not want, so I removed it.
For general purpose scanning I now use the MS Scanner software that came with my XP installation. C:WINDOWSsystem32wiaacmgr.exe -SelectDevice
For better quality and OCR facilities, I use the scanner that came with MS Office. On my machine its at Programs/MS Office Tools/ MS Office Document Scanning.
The result I can save as a regular word file, or I can save it as a .tif or .jpg file and then edit further using irfan.
So in answer to various questions, the software that comes with a scanner can be replaced by any other suitable package, and for bbcirly I encourage a tryout of the MS Office package.

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Scannito Pro has a 30 day unrestricted trial period. I have tried it as OCR and while the interface is puzzling (A learning curve! What else is new?) I have found the OCR far better than the software, or whatever one calls it, which came with the Canon scanner. I’ll give a further progress report as I use it more.

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I use a program called PMView as both my scanner software and my picture viewer/editor. It still uses the original scanner drivers that are Twain compliant.

I have found there are some tricks to getting the scans I want. Maybe the main one would solve your problem. That is to set the resolution to at least two or even three times the resolution you plan to use for the scanned file. For example for normal text readability 300×300 is usually enough for comfortable reading. But if you scan at that resolution you probably will not be able to read the result. Instead, scan at 600×600 or even 900×900 and then using picture editing software, reduce the scanned image down to 300×300. This will produce a very neat crisp scan that is completely readable.

If scanning a glossy magazine page at say 600×600 the scan always comes out with stripes. Instead scan at say 1200×1200 or even 2400×2400 and then reduce the result down to the 600×600 you need. The ugly stripes will disappear and you will have an almost perfect scan.

Why it works this way I can’t tell you, but it always gives good results.

I hope that helps.

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One of the glossed over features of VueScan that convinced me to pay was the ability to calibrate your work flow. Get a cheap, sorry, inexpensive, IT8 calibration target http://www.targets.coloraid.de/ and VueScan and you can calibrate your scanner, printer, and monitor. While I am sure this calibration will not work for professional use, for home use it can get a $50 scanner/printer all-in-one looking every bit as good as the multi-hundred $ one at my office. Not too shabby for $80 for a lifetime and all the hardware you can through at it.

Another, BIG, advantage of VueScan is multi-platform, Windows, Mac, and Linux. I like Win desktops until they get too slow, then they get Ubuntu Linux, and Mac Laptops, so I have several of each type at home and at work. VueScan runs on all of them and runs well.

Also, VueScan, has OCR built in. I am not sure how the accuracy compares to other OCR packages as I do not use it, but it is in there.

So, to summarize, for less than $200 ($80 for software, $50 for hardware, $20 for calibration target) you can get a system that will perform like one that costs far more, it also has a brain dead simple “easy mode” for when you do not need or want to think about it, or you can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you want, you get OCR, you get multi-platform, and you get a very well written and downloadable manual.

Can you tell that I really like this software?

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I use a program called PMView as both my scanner software and my picture viewer/editor. It still uses the original scanner drivers that are Twain compliant.

I have found there are some tricks to getting the scans I want. Maybe the main one would solve your problem. That is to set the resolution to at least two or even three times the resolution you plan to use for the scanned file. For example for normal text readability 300×300 is usually enough for comfortable reading. But if you scan at that resolution you probably will not be able to read the result. Instead, scan at 600×600 or even 900×900 and then using picture editing software, reduce the scanned image down to 300×300. This will produce a very neat crisp scan that is completely readable.

If scanning a glossy magazine page at say 600×600 the scan always comes out with stripes. Instead scan at say 1200×1200 or even 2400×2400 and then reduce the result down to the 600×600 you need. The ugly stripes will disappear and you will have an almost perfect scan.

Why it works this way I can’t tell you, but it always gives good results.

I hope that helps.

When scanning glossy originals, I insert a piece of artist’s matte acrylic sheeting between the scanner glass and the original. This product is available from art supply stores or some photography stores, or online.

-- rc primak

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How can I set the proper page length in these scanning softwares?
As far as I can see, the maximum page length is the letter format: 11 inch.
I am using A-4 paper which has a length of about 11.65 inch.
Anyone any idea?

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I have also recently acquired a Canon 9000F with which I plan to digitize my office. This will include many formats of data ranging from ordinary letter-sized paper documents to 35mm negatives and color slides. The documents are a combination of text, tabular data and pictures, randomly mixed. Oh, and there are also quite a few photographs from the more than half-century before digital cameras.

From the above discussion it sounds like Vuescan will do most of what I need but OCR is a must and what about the 35mm stuff? Will Canon’s software suffice or will I need something better? Admittedly, I haven’t had time to really get to know this thing yet so I welcome any comments/suggestions from the more experienced among you.

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When I went to Windows 7 the software for my Epson Perfection 2480 Photo scanner worked but the Abby Fine Reader OCR software did not. Upgrading Abby would have been quite expensive and I tried using the scanning software in MS Office 2010 and it worked OK. Tried the OCR and it was horrible. I downloaded FreeOCR V3 “Free OCR Software” and I have used it one time and it worked quite well for me. Since it is free, if you need OCR program why not try it.

Bob P

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VueScan from http://www.hamrick.com/ is far and away the best scanner software. I got so $#*&^% off with Hewlett Packard buggy software that I went to this on my XP machine, as well as my Windows 7. It ‘s fast, flexible and works every time. I did the trial thing and liked it so I bought it. Free upgrades are available for a period of time until you’re asked to pay for them. I never have and it works flawlessly.

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Hello!

This is a very interesting thread. Reading all the posts I wondered why nobody mentioned SILVERFAST which IMHO is superior to VueScan. At least if you consider Silverfast’s options to edit during the procedure of scanning as important features.

I never heard of VueScan before, dl’ed the trial – and bought the Pro version a few minutes later. Vuescan is by far better than all the bundled software usually coming along with sanners – except Silverfast 🙂

Admittedly Silverfast is very expensive and always sold in versions for specific scanners. Means you need to upgrade or buy a new software version every time you change the hardware.

If you own a good scanner, not longer supported for new OS versions by the manufacturer, VueScan is THE solution for you.
Yesterday I connected an old Microtek X12USL scanner to my Win 7 x64 computers, installed VueScan 9 and confirmed installation of the drivers included in VueScan. 2 Minutes and I was done, verything worked fine! VueScan supports > 1500 scanner models. See the list here: http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#supported

The only thing I didn’t like was that VueScan installs to C: VueScan w/o asking.

Happy holiday season for everybody!

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> ….it sounds like Vuescan will do most of what I need but OCR is a must

For OCR ABBYY Fine Reader Pro might be what you want.
As for 35 mm film I can’t recommend from own experience. There’s some cheap hardware on the market but I would not expect great results.
AFAIK the Nikon film scanners are good but very expensive.

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Scanning is very much down to the hardware, and it’s relatively easy to produce good image scans these days.

OCR is another matter. MS provides some tools, but there are free appsthat can do the job, as well as the web sites already quoted.

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Scanitto Pro does, in my view, a much better OCR job than does the software that came with Canon LiDE 210 scanner.

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What kind of compatibility does vuescan have with linux for document scanning?

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I only have a little experience with Ubuntu from a couple or 5 years or so ago. But as I recall Vuescan worked great with Ubuntu Linux. The install was fairly straight forward, as I recall, you just unzip it move it to where you want it to live and double click to run. Of course you can make a shortcut anywhere you want or even add it to the menu. The real win is that I have never had a scanner with Linux drivers, but since Vuescan has all of that built in I did not have to. Vuescan just worked, easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Add to all of that the ability to create custom color profiles for scanners and printers, you have to buy an it8 target separately for around $30, but for $110 you get the ability to profile scanners and printers. This is nowhere near pro-quality, I assume, I could be wrong, but I would say it will get you 75% of the way there and you will be very pleased with the results. If you like your current scanner output now you will really love it after profiling. Profiling makes the color pop in a good way.

Also, it has a free trial so give it a go and if you do not like it, then no harm done!

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Thanks!

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Hi All,

I just joined this forum, found it to be interesting and informative. I hope I’m posting in the right thread. Mods, please move if incorrect.
Here’s my situation – I need to scan around 2 million documents into PDF and index based on the bar code printed on them. I would be using Kodak Scanners and the only software I have tried is Kodak Capture Pro Trial which is insanely expensive to buy. Any other alternatives someone could recommend? Appreciate the help.

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Hi All,

I just joined this forum, found it to be interesting and informative. I hope I’m posting in the right thread. Mods, please move if incorrect.
Here’s my situation – I need to scan around 2 million documents into PDF and index based on the bar code printed on them. I would be using Kodak Scanners and the only software I have tried is Kodak Capture Pro Trial which is insanely expensive to buy. Any other alternatives someone could recommend? Appreciate the help.

Er … I’m confused.

Assuming you work alone and
it takes 30 seconds per document to scan (which is optimistic I think),
you work 8 hours per day,
you work 5 days per week,
you work 40 weeks per year.

Then to scan 2,000,000 documents you’ll need 10.41 YEARS.

32553-IDBoF_sig

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Understand the confusion; I should have been more clear.
Firstly, it’s not just me, but a team of 10 people who’d be scanning. Secondly, we use high speed scanners capable of collectively doing 50,000 pages per day. So that gives us a TAT of 40 days.

30 seconds per document? That must be a really slow scanner. We’re talking about scanners capable of 50 to 70 pages per minute.:rolleyes:

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I am currently using VueScan

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I’m not satisfied with the scanning software that came with Canon Scanner LiDE 210; is there any better software available that won’t break the bank? Thanks.

I have bought a LiDE 110 recently and the built in photo detection was awful. After some googling I ended up with AutoSplitter, a multiple photo scanning software. It’s much better than the LiDE software. You put several photos in the scanner and scan them at once, then this will separate them. Sometimes you need to adjust the detected photos manually, but it’s pretty okay. Unfortunately there is no remaster/retouch built in, but it’s pretty cool that the most of the photos are automatically detected, cropped and saved to individual jpeg files.
Cheers!

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Fireman,

To create a new file just open the program and then paste in your desired contents from the clipboard and save it. HTH :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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I use Scannito Pro, because I need the ability to scan to multipage PDFs.

Scannito can do that, but the process is a bit confusing. Basically, you scan all pages to individual PDF files; you then hit the PDF icon to combine all of the individual PDFs into one new combined PDF.

If I didn’t need to do multipage PDFs, I would use Irfanview.

I have no need for OCR, so I can’t comment on that aspect of things.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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I use Scannito Pro, because I need the ability to scan to multipage PDFs.

Scannito can do that, but the process is a bit confusing. Basically, you scan all pages to individual PDF files; you then hit the PDF icon to combine all of the individual PDFs into one new combined PDF.

If I didn’t need to do multipage PDFs, I would use Irfanview.

I have no need for OCR, so I can’t comment on that aspect of things.

Add this to your set of “Free” utilities and you can shuffle those pages into a .pdf any way you like.
http://www.angusj.com/pdftkb/#pdftkbuilder

Yes, it is old for software, but still a goody. 🙂

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Since I started this thread I have watched it with interest. I have Photoshop Elements 6 which is OK for most of what I do with images. I like to also employ OCR and I lost a good OCR when I went to Win 7 and could no longer use Textbridge Pro. Recently I downloaded Free OCR and it works very well except it may have brought unwanted junk with it although I made certain to decline all offers with the download.
Anyono else have experience with Free OCR?

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Interesting thread. I have a Brother MFC-J6710DW with 11″x17″ scanning capability. It’s the best large-format scanner out of 4 or 5 I’ve had over the past 10-15 years. The included Control Center 4 software is fairly easy to understand and is convenient to use for most purposes. You don’t have too much control over scan quality — for example there’s no setting to reduce moire patterns from scanned halftones. But those scans aren’t too bad, anyway, so maybe that capability is built in.

I have a project that requires me to scan about 250 multipage handwritten letters from the WWII era, along with their envelopes. The letters and envelopes are of varying sizes, and I want to crop them before saving the scans — no reason to store a lot of white space on my hard drive. The Brother scanner works OK for them, but as far as I can figure out, you have to crop each one manually by dragging some dotted lines before saving it. Also the scanner lid is big and heavy, and a pain in the arm to deal with for all these little letters and envelopes.

So I bought a CanoScan LiDE 210 for under $85, to see how it would work for me. I had used a LiDE previously, and I really liked it but wasn’t impressed with its clunky MP Navigator software, which was also used with other Canon scanners I have owned. The LiDE 210 is a nice, small unit that handles my letters and envelopes really easily. The scanner lid is light and very easy to lift. Unfortunately and unbelievably, the MP Navigator software has become MUCH clunkier over time. It is VERY hard to figure out how to use it, and the extensive documentation, though clearly written, is nearly useless due to its clumsy organization. There are dozens of on-screen buttons with poorly-defined functions, and a saving and cataloging system that seems possibly rational, but is totally unable to be figured out. Through extensive trial and error, I’ve found the settings that are perfect for me, but it is REALLY hard to get to them.

The secret is to get to the so-called “ScanGear Scanner Driver”, which you do with four cryptic clicks, but must be sure you’ve checked one mysterious checkbox. (If I hadn’t used many previous versions of Canon scanner software, I’d never have been able to figure it out. Great scanners, horrid software that might have been designed in Somalia or some other failed state, or by the guys who programmed the Obamacare websites.)

Once I get to the Scanner Driver in its poorly-explained Advanced Mode, I’ve got a control panel with about 20 useful settings, each of which CAN be figured out by consulting the Somali help system. When I click the Preview button, the scanner takes a quick look at what’s on the glass, and displays it with dotted crop lines in the proper place. In 300+ scans of different-sized yellowed documents, it has yet to fail in placing the crop lines exactly where they should be. A click of the green Scan button produces a quick, properly cropped scan. If subsequent pages are the same size as the Previewed one, they will be scanned in the proper size if properly placed on the glass. If they are different, they just need to be previewed again.

The bottom line is that the Canon MP Navigator software does exactly what I need with the slick little LiDE 210 scanner, AFTER I’ve figured out how to get to the right place. And THAT is a VERY difficult task.

And BTW, the scans aren’t saved as they are made, which a rational being might expect. They go into something called “My Box”, from which they can be saved if you figure out how to do it. Sheesh!

What I need now is to find a way to have the AutoScan button on the LiDE 210 call up the ScanGear Scanner Driver without going through three to five extraneous steps. Since Canon has no email, chat, or phone support for its scanners, I don’t think I’ll ever find it. When my project is finished, I plan to take the scanner back to BestBuy for a refund. That may be a bit tacky, but BestBuy doesn’t mind, and Canon’s software is impossible to figure out.

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I have Canon LiDE 20 and the software is a curse. Maybe I’ll try that four click procedure to see how that works. The software I really liked was Textbridge but it’s not compatible with Win 7 unfortunately. I used Textbridge with a previous Canon scanner.

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Still can’t figure what thee four clicks are. Oh,well so much for that.

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This works for the LiDE 210:

Start MP Navigator EX 4.0 (This seems to be a special version for the LiDE 210)

[*]Click Scan/Import
[*]Click Photos/Documents (Platen)
[*]Check Use the Scanner driver (that will change the picture below)
[*]Click Open Scanner Driver

36798-Capture

Then you will see a reasonable, understandable control panel.

36799-Capture

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Thank you very much. I will certainly try that and report my results. It’s really great to be able to assist each other. Incidentally, I found the free OCR one of the best for its “price.”

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RE: Canon MP Navigator software

I’ve done some Googling of ‘MP Navigator’ and ‘LiDE 210’. I didn’t find any forums or help, just various download sites. Apparently there are different versions of MP Navigator for different scanners. At least that is what was mentioned a few times. I haven’t found a way, other than in the startup screen, to find which version of the software I am using. A graphic when I start it says ‘MP Navigator EX 4.0’, with no date or release number.

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Here is the scanning software that you need:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/naps2/

NAPS2 is free, and it is extremely simple to use. You can easily scan to a multipage PDF or to JPG.

Here is their description:

NAPS2 is a document scanning application with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Scan your documents from WIA- and TWAIN-compatible scanners, organize the pages as you like, and save them as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and other file formats. Requires .NET Framework 4.0 or higher.

I downloaded and installed it. It took me about two minutes to figure out how to use it. It is superior software, not complicated in any way.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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Lou
I have the LIDE 500 F. The software I normally use is called Canoscan toolbox.
The options as you listed do not seem to be available on that interface.
But having the inspiration to look about I noticed a shortcut to ‘ScanGear Starter’ which brings up an interface similar to your jpg. Curiously the short cut leads to :
C:WINDOWStwain_32CNQSGSGST.exe
and a ScanGear directory under program files is empty.
And perhaps true to form the help button on said interface does nothing obvious. I will have to play with this when ever. It always seems I am in a hurry when I use my scanner.

PS just a thought, this scanner has always annoyed me as the usb connection is on the ‘front’ where the function buttons are. Just backwards, what could they have been thinking?

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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RE: Canon MP Navigator software

I’ve had several Canon scanners, with several versions of their software. The user interface, as I remember it, has always been clunky, sometimes extremely so, and the online help has always been rather opaque. However, once you get to the ScanGear interface, you have access to a pretty powerful and useful application.

I also have a Brother all-in-one, and their included software is pretty good. It’s easy to use once you figure out how to configure the buttons, but it doesn’t have the many different options of the Canon ScanGear.

There seems to be a way to print out the MP Navigator user manual. I’m going to give it a try. I will also try the NAPS2 software recommended above.

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I just printed the manual to a PDF file. I found it very inconvenient to use when looking at one page at a time on screen, so I figured that it might be helpful to look at the whole manual at once.

The entire manual is 316 pages long. In my PDF version, there is no clickable index, and you can’t do a text search. Nevertheless, the PDF is useful. You can scroll through the pages to get the overall picture of the manual. You could print it out if you wanted to.

The manual is pretty thorough, with detailed descriptions for every dialog box that the software can produce. What is missing is an overall view, or any way to easily get to commonly-used subjects.

It looks like the software has a LOT of features for processing images, either as scanned on the scanner or as loaded from other files. I think I’d prefer to use Photoshop, but ScanGear can do a lot of this stuff on its own.

One nice feature of the on-screen manual is that you can set up a “My Manual” system, in which you can access frequenly-used manual pages without going through the trouble of searching for them. I didn’t try it, but it looks interesting. The hard part, of course, is finding the pages you want in the first place.

Bottom line on MP Navigator: Clunky, hard-to-figure-out user interface, with a decent but hard-to-figure-out manual, but with good features once you figure everything out.

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I just downloaded and tried the NAPS2 software mentioned above. The download was painless, and using the software was easy and intuitive (provided you have some experience with scanner software). It seems to be a full-service program for scanning documents, without much ability to optimize the image while scanning. That may best be done in Photoshop or similar, anyway.

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About all I ever scan is documents; and when I do scan images, I rarely do any modifications to them other than cropping or brightening them up if they are dark.

The multi-page PDF feature is my favorite feature; the extreme simplicity is a close second.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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RE: NAPS2 Simplicity

It IS definitely simple, especially if you have a little bit of experience with other scanner software. Like you, I mostly scan documents. When I scan photos, I fix them in Photoshop, so simple scanner software is a good thing to have.

In setting up Profiles, I don’t know much about the choice between WIA Driver and TWAIN Driver, and I don’t know what Use native WIA UI means. Neither do I know what Scale is all about.

Also, I’m pretty sure I found some sort of help screen, but I can’t find it now.

Can you enlighten me (and all of us) on this?

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RE: NAPS2 Simplicity

It IS definitely simple, especially if you have a little bit of experience with other scanner software. Like you, I mostly scan documents. When I scan photos, I fix them in Photoshop, so simple scanner software is a good thing to have.

In setting up Profiles, I don’t know much about the choice between WIA Driver and TWAIN Driver, and I don’t know what Use native WIA UI means. Neither do I know what Scale is all about.

Also, I’m pretty sure I found some sort of help screen, but I can’t find it now.

Can you enlighten me (and all of us) on this?

Lou:

TWAIN is a standard for scanners that has been around for a very long time. It seems to me to be a bit better (more capable) than WIA.

I generally start with TWAIN; if for any reason it doesn’t work, I go with WIA. Recently I installed NAPS2 on a customer’s computer. For some reason, TWAIN wouldn’t work, but WIA works perfectly.

It really doesn’t matter which one you use.

Jim

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

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TWAIN vs WIA:
http://www.rastertovector.com/r2v-articles/what-are-twain-and-wia.htm

Native WIA UI : Native WIA User Inteface built into Windows.

Jerry

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