Scan to PDF

TechnoEsq welcomes Edward Brutscher as a contributing author to our growing blog. Ed recently became a solo practitioner to assist insurance companies, their insureds, individuals, and businesses with cases requiring a specialized understanding of tort and insurance law. We are proud to have Ed writing for us and anticipate many enlightening articles from him.

This is the first of a series of guest articles on free software that I have incoporated into my solo law practice. Feel free to leave a comment, or if you like, you can reach me at 502.855.3140 or eabrutscher@kytortjournal.com.

Have a document that you want to scan to your computer and save as a PDF file? Simply scan it and save it as a PDF file, right? Perhaps. However, what if your scanner or multifunction printer doesn’t convert to PDF? Many scanners will only convert documents into an image. This image must then be viewed like any other picture. Scan more than one page and you are left with multiple images, which must be saved, stored, and viewed separately. Try to email a multipage document and you must attach each image separately. The recipient must then view each attachment as a separate image. Hardly, the easiest and most professional way of sending documents to your clients.

Adobe has perfected the PDF process with its Acrobat Professional software. However, like most proprietary software (think Microsoft Office) it is big, expensive and resource intensive. It also may offer more bells and whistles than the standard user really needs. Run a search of programs scanning to PDF and almost all require you to pay. I recently incorporated a free program into my office that will convert your scanned images or hard drive images to PDF. It’s called Scan2PDF 1.5 by Softpedia.

Softpedia describes Scan2PDF as follows; “Scan2PDF enables you to scan paper documents and save them to PDF format on your computer for digital archiving or backup. In addition, you can also load images from your hard drive and combine them with a scanned document, or combine multiple documents/images into a single PDF file.” Best of all, its totally free.

I use the program and find it to be a great free alternative that is useful in those times when I need to scan a small number of documents or a multipage document like a pleading. I can then either save it to my file or email it. I can add as many images to the file as I chose. I can also place them in whatever order I want. Save them to PDF and your done. No big and expensive software to buy. Unfortunately, the interface is at times difficult to learn and there is no help file or instruction manual. You’ll simply need to play around with it to get the hang of it. This is not something everyone will want to do. One of the trickiest issues is saving the image in a size that is compatible with a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. It took several tries before I realized I needed to reduce the compression to 600 x 800 to reduce the image to a standard 8.5′ by 11.5′ legal size paper. However, once you get the hang of it, the software does exactly what you want. It scans documents into the PDF format.

You can google the software or you can download Scan2PDF 1.5, here. (Scan2PDF 1.6 is now available, here, but I have not yet used it). Be careful of imitations that offer a free trial, only to require purchase after a limited time. Scan2PDF is freeware. Overall, I give Scan2PDF a positive rating as follows:

Pros:

• Free
• Simple design
• Not scanner dependent
• Not a resource hog
• Does exactly what it says
• Did I mention its free

Cons:

• Interface can be confusing
• No help or instructions

Ed Brutscher