Works With All TWAIN/WIA Compatible Scanners

So what do WIA and TWAIN stand for?

And who’s the old guy?

WIA stands for Windows Image Acquisition.

TWAIN stands for….well…nobody is actually that sure. The name originally comes from Rudyard Kipling‘s The Ballad of East And West:

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

The name was chosen to illustrate the rather complex problem of trying to get computers to talk to different makes of scanners in a consistent way. I’m not entirely sure why it is capitalized to make it look like an acronym. In fact, it looks so much like an acronym, that developers actually set about creating an expansion of TWAIN, to make it officially an acronym. Unfortunately they didn’t come up with anything that sounded…right.

Technology Without An Interesting Name

You can see these guys never worked in marketing. So it’s just TWAIN – it looks like an acronym, but it isn’t.

TWAIN is the name we use to describe the standard way in which software developers like me, can talk to all the different makes of scanners in the same way. Most scanners support at least some of the standard, with the notable exception of the Scansnaps (don’t get me started). WIA is a microsoft standard, but is pretty much the same thing from a user’s perspective.

Will My Scanner Work?

Here’s the definitive answer – probably.

If you’re not using a Scansnap, there’s a very good chance that your scanner ships with either a TWAIN or WIA driver. This in turn means that there’s a very good chance your scanner will happily work with PDF Scan Pro.

There’s only one way to know for sure.

Our software comes with generous free trials, so why not take advantage and find out?