It seems to me that it would be quite easy to create software that would scan all the odd pages first on the simplex ADF of an all in one printer and then scan all the even pages and then combine them properly into one PDF document.
Is there a program that does this that I am not aware of ?
From software it could easily achievable, I thought of it (and I code software too), and a few times I handled this from the software angle combining the scanned docs, or just making it easier for Adobe Acrobat Pro to handle all the scanned documents in order then.
But there are some issues with this that I faced from personal experience:
- Not always the pages are scanned perfectly, sometimes the scanner picks two together, or two slightly displaced, so you have to take that apart and scan again
- IA could solve the problem trying to identify page numbers, but there is no way to make sure all the docs have them, or that the numbers are placed on the sample place
- Software already has issues identifying some pages mode (portrait / landscape), it's not that easy to solve it all
I played with diff scanners and all in one machines, simple and duplex ADF, the best experience took place with the OfficeJet 8600 Pro Plus, because it has auto duplex scanning, but even so it wasn't perfect. Then I moved away from that and bought high speed duplex scanners, 2 Kodak and one Neato. The first Kodak was an expensive model, quite fast but didn't do the job perfectly (jammed pages) so I sold it. I still have the other duplex Kodak, works better but a bit slower (it's not exactly high end), but still jams the pages. On the other hand the cheaper... Neato (also duplex) is doing a much better job and rarely jams the paper.
So I'm staying with my 2 duplex scanners.
* Paper has issues with humidity, so, many times this produces issues getting multiple pages together while scanning, things work better with really dry paper. Even so, paper is porous, so the scanner rollers get some kind of dust while scanning (from the paper), and so they need cleaning to work as expected. I believe duplex scanners solve the task pretty well, but there is a physical engineering challenge still.
