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Undecided

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 4, 2005
710
185
California
Hi everyone...my brother, a recent Mac convert (yay!), has my old 15" PowerBook, with Leopard, and everything is working well. He has an HP PhotoSmart C3150 all-in-one printer, scanner, fax machine.

I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap at home to scan documents quickly and easily into PDFs, and it works GREAT. He would also like to be able to scan to PDF.

His HP PhotoSmart includes software (HP Scan Pro 9.7.1) which, among other things, will scan to PDF. However, it's a complete pain to use.

It always insists on (a) reverting to scanning photos by default (instead of multi-page documents), and (b) automatically selecting the item to be scanned from the image area.

(b) is the main problem - stick in an 8.5"x11" piece of paper and it invariably selects an area of about 7.69"x9.34" or whatever - basically, the area containing the text itself only. You have to resize the selection box to 8.5"x11" every time. This is extremely frustrating and I don't see any way to make it just scan a letter sized area in full.

What I need for him is an easy application to scan letter size fully (by default) into a multi-page PDF. Basically, what I need is the ScanSnap software that will work with his HP.

I tried installing Adobe Acrobat 9 and using its acquire mode, but all it does is launch the HP Scan Pro tool first to do the actual scanning, so I'm right back where I started from.

Any suggestions? (The ScanSnap is too expensive for him, so him getting one is not an option.)
 
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