Category Archives: News

Improved scanning to PDF for CmdTwain

CmdTwain 2.12 has been released and it produces better PDFs for multipage documents.

CmdTwain 2.11 provides a scan to PDF option. It works great for single page scans and it does support multiple pages. But, the two don’t work together quite as intended. People were reporting that the first page scanned was getting placed as the last page in the PDF.

The cause is due to how filenames (for the pages) are sorted within the program. It uses the whole filename including the extension during the sort. For backward compatability reasons, page one is always named (something).jpg and pages two on are named (something)-00002.jpg etc. The character ‘.’ is stored internally with a value of 46. The character ‘-‘ has a value of 45. This always puts "(something).jpg" after "(something)-(anything)" which is not how it needs to be.

CmdTwain 2.12 comes with an improved sort routine that handles these cases properly.

CmdTwain 2.02

CmdTwain 2.02 has just been released. It is a minor tweak to 2.01 in that /SOURCE no longer accesses the default scanner (so if you don’t have one you should be able to see that and install or select one). You don’t get a “check cables …” message when simply choosing a scanner.

It also includes an optional GUI (graphical user interface). I suspect most of you get CmdTwain because you can just click on something and have it scan, or run a program from within your program to get a scan. That hasn’t changed. That’s all still there and it works exactly the same way as it always has. However, some people have been asking for a GUI so I’ve added an extra program that pops up a user interface, allows people to choose things, and provides a scan button. When they click that, it runs the normal CmdTwain program.
Continue reading CmdTwain 2.02

Fix Scans and Pictures

Sometimes scanners just make our lives difficult. They have silly defaults and, sometimes, no way to change them. I’ve heard of one scanner that always scans the same size regardless of what you tell it. Its view is, “you can fix that in software.”

I’ve heard of another where it always scans upside down. Probably there is a feeder or it’s installed somewhere where you can’t insert the paper any other way.

So, for the times where it really shouldn’t be this difficult, I’ve added a program to the GssEziSoft collection called FixPic. It will turn pictures around or flip them over if you need it to.

You could also use it to update a batch of pictures (if you have a stack of old sideways scans, or something like that).