Automating scanning

[pmailkeey]

Hi,

These seem to be the sort of questions that's been asked before! I've scanned the FAQ for 'scanning' and tried searching the forum!

Many scanners have event buttons to trigger software on the computer. Will IrfanView work with these to:

1. Scan several pages to file
2. Scan several pages to printer*

without needing to do anything at the computer?

* with an option to send output to printer 2 pages at a time (duplex printing).

A 'blind copy' feature would be good too - (possibly a separate utility (one might be available somewhere already)) - such that the scan button would trigger the whole 'photocopy' process without doing anything at all at the computer.

Any pointers much appreciated, thanks.

Mike.

[Mij]

If you have buttons on your scanner then you probably got a utility program with it that does the first part of what you describe. With my Canon scanner the utility is called Canoscan Toolbox. That allows items to be scanned as an image and sent to a file or to a printer each time the buttons are pressed. Irfanview has no part in that.

Instead of being sent directly to file the scanned images can be sent to an external program and I can set that to be Irfanview, but there is no feature within Irfanview to automatically trigger a print whenever an image is received. It would probably be possible to send the image to a Batch or other script file though and that could send the image to Irfanview using a command line that has the /Print= option in it. For a single scan that would only do what the utility can do already but in theory you could do a lot more with a script towards automating multiple scans or editing images before they are printed.

In short, find out what you can do already with the software that came with the scanner and, if you want to do more than that and are willing to invest the time in writing scripts, you may well find that Irfanview can do it for you.

[pmailkeey]

I can right-click on the scanner in devices and printers and choose 'scan properties' where I can choose what the 'event' does (nothing/prompt/run) but this only offers two programs (as it is) and neither will automate. From what you say, IV doesn't either!

Thanks anyway, I'll keep looking.

Mike.

PS what's with the expired tokens?