Scan many pages (almost) directly into a combined PDF
Jun 13, '07 07:30:07AM
Contributed by: prospero
I have to print, sign, scan, and email a lot of documents, and have been seeking out an easy way to do it for a while. It's been particularly aggravating for multi-page documents, because Image Capture saves each scan as an individual file. There are a couple of tools that can scan directly to PDF, but they cost about $60 or more, and that's a lot for a simple function like this, in my opinion. Today I hit upon an extremely easy way of scanning directly to PDF format that uses freeware tools:
- Get your scanner all set up, using whatever drivers you need. (This can sometimes be a bear on OSX. If your scanner manufacturer doesn't provide a driver, check out the SANE project; they may have something for you).
- Download and install CombinePDF, a really fantastic little tool that I've found handy on many occasions.
- Connect your scanner to your Mac and fire up Image Capture.
- In the toolbar to the right, click on the drop-down next to Automatic Tasks.
- Click on "Other..."
- Browse to wherever CombinePDF is installed, select it, and click Open.
- Now insert your document into the scanner and click Scan.
- As each page is scanned, its file will be dumped into CombinePDF. So this works for multi-page documents, too -- each page will appear as a filename in CombinePDF.
- When all of your pages are scanned in, click on "Merge PDF..." in CombinePDF.
- Select a location for the final PDF and give it a name, then click OK.
That's it -- when you click OK, your combined PDF will be created. I originally posted this on my blog.
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Mac OS X Hints
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