Monday, June 23, 2014

Version 9 - Scanning - WIA and TWAIN support

Question: What scanner support is included with Solid PDF Tools v9?

Answer: We have added WIA support into version 9 as too many customers only had WIA support for their scanning devices. Now you can choose between TWAIN and WIA. We also pop up the manufacturer's device scanning dialog so you can use all the features that your particular scanner supports.

Scanner Drivers: TWAIN or WIA

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.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Version 9 is available

Solid Documents has just released version 9 of all our Windows software products:

Desktop Software:


Free, fully functional trials are available on our website.

Changes

New features include File | Print, Search and a new scanner interface (supporting TWAIN and WIA drivers). 

We continue to focus on improvements to our industry leading PDF conversion engine, OCR and overall document reconstruction process.