Scanning Documents

May 17, 2005 4:24 AM

What is the best software for scanning documents?

I am building a scan station at my office to facilitate scanning in documents from our copier. It uses a TWAIN scan driver to scan over the network.

The trick here, is that it needs to be extremely easy to use. I want users to be able to walk over, click "scan" and then simply go grab their files off the server, without selecting a bunch of options.

I've found a couple of scan packages, but nothing that really fits perfectly well with what I am trying to accomplish.

posted by benjh to computers & internet (6 comments total)

My ideal solution would be command line. Then I could set up a shortcut on the terminal's desktop, with the command line already configured, so that when they double click, it just starts scanning.
posted by benjh at 4:56 AM on May 17, 2005

If OCR is not needed, scanning directly into Adobe Acrobat is often the easiest approach.

If you need OCR, there are many available flavors. My preference is FineReader.
posted by yclipse at 5:02 AM on May 17, 2005

No OCR is needed.
posted by benjh at 5:42 AM on May 17, 2005

Searching on Google for '"command line" TWAIN' seems to give some promising results, especially this one for $99. If the station is a Linux or Mac computer and the scaner is supported, you could use SANE for free. But since it's a fancy copier system, it probably isn't supported.
posted by zsazsa at 6:35 AM on May 17, 2005

We've had really good results with the Fujtsu ScanSnap range: Load in the document, hit the "scan" button on the front and Acrobat pops up with your document. I'm sure you could write a simple script to save it into a directory as needed.

Plus, you've got a dedicated document scanner so nobody's tying up the photocopier when it's needed.
posted by blag at 8:21 AM on May 17, 2005

The MFP (Multi Function Peripheral) usually handles all of the scanning and then simply dumps the document somewhere on the network. I am puzzled that you would have this problem - I have never heard of such a thing, and I do this stuff for a living.

Should you need scanning software, Kofax is pretty much considered to be the best out there, but it's not cheap.
posted by gregariousrecluse at 10:33 AM on May 17, 2005