It’s been a pretty full week, and today’s update is probably the most significant since Home Document Manager’s launch.

What’s new? Well…scanning’s new. As of today, you can scan directly into Home Document Manager using any TWAIN or WIA compatible scanner – if you don’t know what that means you can safely ignore this sentence. You can now scan in single 1-page documents in a flatbed or multiple 1-page documents and multi-page documents using the document feeder.

There are a couple of wrinkles in the scanning of multiple pages into a multi-page PDF file, but these seem to be driver specific and I’ll be working to iron these out over the next week.

Here’s what it looks like – To start with, there is new section in the main ribbon of the application for scanning related activities:

New menu items

The new commands are Select Scanner, Single Page Document Scan, and Multi-page Document Scan.

Select Scanner allows you to choose which of the image acquisition devices attached to your computer you wish to use. If you don’t choose a device, the default device for your system is used. On my system, it presents me with the following choices:

Select image acquisition source.

Single Page Document Scan is ideal if you want to scan only a subsection of a page using the flatbed, or have a collection of single page documents and want to import them quickly using the document feeder. When you click import, you’re asked to provide a useful name for your document, this doesn’t impact the built in search functionality, but it does make a document more instantly recognisable in the document list.

A useful name for your document

After you’ve entered a useful name, or accepted the default, you’re presented with the scanning dialog on which you can adjust various properties of the scan, ranging from DPI (dots per inch, or image quality) to color, even which part of an image is captured.

The Scanning Dialog

If you’re using the flatbed, clicking ‘Preview‘ allows you to preview the document and adjust which part is captured, if necessary. For example:

Select An Area To Scan

Here, we can see the selection rectangle has been reduced to minimise the amount of empty white space in the scanned document. Clicking “Adjust the quality of the scanned picture” presents the following dialog:

Scanning Properties

allowing you to alter brightness, contrast, color and image quality. Finding the optimal properties will be something of an art, depending on your scanner and the types of documents you’re importing.

The process for Multi-page Document Scan is the same. Using the document feeder, load in the pages for the multi-page document, they are each scanned in turn and compiled into a single multi-page PDF file. The document is then imported as usual.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback over the last week. With such a significant chunk of functionality going in today, your feedback will be crucial in ironing out any wrinkles. As usual, there is no action required on your part tu upgrade – Home Document Manager will quietly install the update when there is a connection to the Internet.

Happy shredding!

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