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.

Version 9 is available

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

Desktop Software:

Solid Converter v9
Solid PDF Tools v9
Solid PDF/A Express v9
Solid PDF to Word v9
Solid Scan to Word v9

Process Automation:
Solid Automator v9
Solid Commander v9

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. 

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.

v8 has New User Interface

v8 includes a new and improved user interface where the core tasks are easily available.

Solid PDF Tools v8 User Interface

The v8 rewrite was a conscious shift back to our core features : a focus on document reconstruction functionality. 

Adding new features to the product going forward is prioritized by customer requests so please send your feedback to support@soliddocuments.com.

The v8 rewrite was required to take advantage of 64-bit architectures and multi-core processors. A rewrite using Microsoft .NET was required so that we could engineer the product using our own Solid Framework SDK (unlike the older products which were based on a legacy architecture).

Watch our getting started video.

New Version 8 Available

We have released version 8!

Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools helps you improve, create and convert PDFs into Word and Excel in addition to other file formats, resulting in accurate, high quality documents that are easy to reuse. 

Included in this version 8 release are two process automation applications: Solid Automator and Solid Commander. Solid Documents has also released three new applications with specific functionality: Solid PDF to Word, Solid Scan to Word and Solid PDF/A Express.

"The v8 rewrite was a conscious shift back to our core features : a focus on document reconstruction functionality" said Michael Cartwright, CEO of Solid Documents. "The v8 rewrite was required to take advantage of 64-bit architectures and multi-core processors. A rewrite using Microsoft .NET was required so that we could engineer the products using our own Solid Framework SDK (unlike the older products which were based on a legacy architecture)."

Getting started videos are available, along with other product feature tutorials.

Solid Converter PDF 7.3 Released

Solid Documents has just released version 7.3 of Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools. Improvements in version 7.3 include:

• Solid OCR (optical character recognition) now supports 8 languages (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish).
• PDF to Word: heading/style detection, table of contents reconstruction, hierarchical list reconstruction.
• Complete rework of PDF to PowerPoint reconstruction including transitions, master slides and PowerPoint specific layout engine.
• Great improvements to PDF to HTML conversion to take advantage of table of contents reconstruction and style detection. Single page output with navigation frame or multiple linked HTML pages for navigation.

Download Solid Converter PDF - 15 day fully functional trial version (we only watermark output while in trial mode)
Download Solid PDF Tools

Optimize Your PDF Documents

Solid PDF Tools v6, Solid Converter PDF v6, Solid PDF Creator Plus v6 and Solid PDF Creator v6 each provide compression options that allow you to reduce the size of your PDF files. Optimize your file sizes for presentation on the Web or for print while preserving an appropriate level of quality.

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Is Bigger Always Better?

When you are referring to the size of your hard drive or the dollar amount of your annual bonus, then bigger probably is better, but if you are trying to save space on that hard drive or e-mail a family newsletter with pictures of all the new toys you just bought with your gigantic pay-check, then you probably want to be able to keep the size of your electronic files on the small side.

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Available in 13 Languages

At Solid Documents our focus is to provide you with excellent tools that enhance your ability to produce high-quality documents. We build software that helps you create, convert, translate or publish electronic or paper documents, quickly and simply.

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Going Paperless? Organize multiple documents for your E-Fax with Solid PDF Tools for a professional looking presentation.

How many times have you had to put various important documents together and make it look professional so it could be faxed?



Create one file from a multitude of other file types for upload and send



Many find themselves with a Word doc, a scanned PDF, a Tiff image and an Excel spreadsheet scattered all over their desktop. Let Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools help organize all this and more into one consistent and clean looking document that is compatible with most E-fax programs, such as Efax.com, faxitnice.com, or Metrofax.

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Solid PDF Tools v6 Now Available

Solid Documents has released version 6 of Solid PDF Tools, our popular PDF creation, conversion and archiving software. With Solid PDF Tools you can:

• Convert PDFs to PDF/A
• Validate PDF/A
• Convert PDF to MS Word
• Convert PDFs to HTML
• Convert PDFs to Text
• Convert PDF Tables to Excel
• Scan directly to MS Word
• Create PDF Bookmarks from Office
• And much more!

Per specifications from the PDF/D Consortium, version 6 now exports PDF/A validation and conversion reports. The validator and converter have also been improved to:

• provide support for XMP validation
• pass 100% of the Bavaria Test Suite cases (v5 already passed the Isartor cases)

With the improvements to our PDF/A technology, we believe version 6 is now one of the best PDF/A tools availabe on the market today. This PDF/A functionality is also available to both .NET and C++ developers through our Solid Framework SDK product.

Scan to PDF Using Solid PDF Tools

Solid PDF Tools provides a number of powerful scanning features for creating PDF documents, including:

• Scanning multiple pages into one or more PDF documents
• The use of automatic document feeders to scan multiple pages quickly
• Applying OCR during the scanning process to create a searchable text layer in your scanned PDF documents.

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