MacOS – Simple scanning to PDF

macospdfscanning

In OS X Mountain Lion, is there an easy and fast way to scan to PDF, with multiple pages per PDF?

I know this can be achieved with Image Capture, but in my opinion that is just a terrible application. For my purpose (quickly scanning handouts), it is very slow and painful. (Overview scan, then select the part of the page I want, even though I always want the full page, restart it every time I want a new PDF, etc.) It seems to me that it was designed mostly for scanning things like photos, as it really does a terrible job for documents.

I'm open to using a 3rd party app – for example, Linux has the remarkably good and simple Simple Scan app, which would be perfect for my purpose.

Best Answer

I use Image Capture for exactly that purpose

  • The overview scan can be avoided by setting Image Capture to always scan the full page (A4 or Letter) and to not do object detection
  • If you scan multiple documents they get written into distinct PDF files (which actually just get numbered)

For more specific needs there's also the option to create an Automator Workflow for Image Capture.

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