Thursday, December 19, 2013

What is Non-Standard Encoding?

Let's start by looking at what standard encoding is and how it works.

Each English alphabetical and numerical character A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 and so on has a corresponding ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) Decimal or Hexadecimal code associated with it. Microsoft Word, Notepad and plain text editors use ASCII to display the desired characters.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Batch Processing with Solid Commander

Looking for an automated batch processing solution for PDF processing? Try Solid Commander - automated PDF to Word conversion, PDF/A validation, PDF to PDF/A conversion, searchable PDF creation and text extraction.



Take a video tour and learn more.


Sunday, December 1, 2013

Scanners ...TWAIN... WIA...

Question: What is TWAIN and WIA? What does this have to do with Solid Converter v8?

Answer: TWAIN and WIA are standards for communicating with imaging devices - scanners, in our case, and software applications.

"The word 'twain' is an archaic form meaning 'two'. It appears in Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West' - '... and never the twain shall meet ...', reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry 'Technology Without An Interesting Name' continues to haunt the standard." - from Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing
TWAIN drivers are provided by your scanner's manufacturer (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, etc.). When you run Solid Converter it discovers what TWAIN drivers you have installed so it can talk to your scanning devices.

WIA (Windows Imaging Acquistion) is from Microsoft and is an utility that allows you to scan into any application that supports WIA.

Solid Converter v8 only uses TWAIN as its interface to scanning devices.

If you scanner does not support TWAIN you can use the software supplied with your scanner to scan your paper documents. Save the scanned images as tiff and then create a PDF using Create PDF with Solid Converter.