Dear users, since many of you told me that iCopy is very useful for creating PDF documents from the scanner using many of the free PDF printer programs available on the net, I decided to develop a built-in PDF export feature to simplify the creation of PDF documents with iCopy. This way, iCopy will be able to save to PDF without the need for an external program.

Since this is a huge improvement of iCopy and has been a challenging exercise for me (I’m just an amateur programmer), I need you to test this new feature and report your problems/thoughts about it.

As you will notice, the main window interface has been changed a little: you will find three checkable buttons below the big copy button. Their use should be straightforward. The first on the left will enable the “Acquire multiple pages” mode: iCopy will keep asking for pages to scan until you decide to print the acquired pages. The other two will control the output of the acquisition. When none is selected, the document will go to the printer. The one in the middle will tell iCopy to save to file, the one on the right, rather self-explanatory, is the new Export to PDF feature.

In the Image Settings palette, a new option “Center image” is available. If checked, it will of course tell iCopy to center the image on the page.

iCopy 1.6 beta1 is available for download on Sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/icopy/files/iCopy/1.6/

Please report bugs or suggestion using the bug tracker.

Though I wrote almost all the PDF code,  I included some code from the iTextSharp for the flate compression. iTextSharp is released under the Affero GPL license. I would like to thank the developers for their great library.

URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp

iCopy 1.5.1 is a maintenance release. The new major feature is the support for duplex ADF acquisition. Moreover, some problems with Brother scanners have been fixed, as well as crashes occurring when some components are not registered on the system. All users are encouraged to update their version.

Please download the new version from the download page.

I would also like to anticipate the new feature that will come with the next release: iCopy will (if everything goes as expected…) save PDF files without the need for external software! Stay tuned!

iCopy 1.5 adds some important features, but the most important one is, for sure, Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) support! If you check the corresponding option in the main window, the scanner will be used in ADF mode and all the pages in the feeder will be acquired and sent to the printer (or saved to file).

I wish to thank all the iCopy users that helped me with testing this new feature with their scanner. Unfortunately, I haven’t received enough feedback for the duplex function, so it is not included in this release.

Here’s a list of the most important changes:

• ADF support
• New, more powerful command line parameters
• Improved stability and compatibility with many scanners
• Revised setup and improved scanner button registration
• Automatic check for updates
• A new logging feature will help me to fix problems if you file a new bug report
• Less memory consumption
• Various optimizations and bugfixes