View Single Post
Old 7th Jul 2021, 9:50 pm   #8
WME_bill
Octode
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Exeter, Devon, UK.
Posts: 1,553
Default Re: Scanning of Manuals & Circuit Diagrams?

Scanning Manuals.
I seem to have three different scanners, acquired over the past 10 years.
The main one is a Kyocera A3 printer-scanner which scans B&W with automatic feed, single or both sided. It is networked and now I know it's foibles, works well. It prints out or scans larger or smaller or almost any variation of size, and can rotate a scanned document. It was a proper commercial machine, and really a luxury for a home office, but never seems to need a laser cartridge refill, so marvellously economical to run, A3, A4, foolscap, B4, B5 etc. I use a cheap Colour Laser-Jet 1215 for colour printing A4, but the refills are so expensive, I avoid using it unless I have to have colour.

For my other scanners, I use VueScan Professional. Works very well indeed. With the Fujitsu Fi5120, scans A4, single or both sides. Very fast and easy. I use it as B/W, though it can do colour.
Will gobble up whole A4 double sided manual very quickly, and dump the whole pdf file in my computer. Does not usually jam.
The Fujitsu proprietory software was very good when I bought the machine, but it was intended for XP 32 bit. Shows how many years ago I acquired it. It does not work for Win7 or Win10, 64 bit, and no update/revised version is available. Buy a new Fujitsu scanner I am told! Whereas the VueScan works well.

I run both at 300dpi to pdf, which I can then tidy-up later in Acrobat (crop, trim black margins, invert, re-arrange pages order), not the AcrobatReader. B/W or colour as wanted.
By using a proper comb-binding machine, I can get a reasonable professional finish on any manuals I make.

The other scanner is a HP SJ5590. It does single or duplex A4 autofeed, but it is slow. I used to use it for colour. The software supplied is very troublesome. HP software always seems very tender and easily put off. Perhaps I don't buy their latest machine and software update frequently enough. Claimed to work with Win7 but does not seem to.
It does work with VueScan.
I think the VueScan Professional cost about £25.
wme_bill

Last edited by WME_bill; 7th Jul 2021 at 10:06 pm.
WME_bill is offline