CmdTwain 2.10 was released a while ago and it has some really nice new features. The one that many of you will be interested in is the ability to scan multiple pages.
It has been able to scan multiple pages for a while now but, wow, was it hard! With version 2.10 that changed significantly. Here’s what happened …
Initially, CmdTwain was written for a flatbed document scanner. You’d put a page on the scanner and CmdTwain would scan it. One page. Run the program once. One scan.
The world moved forward and we got sheet feeders and fancier document scanners but Cmdtwain remained mostly the same. There were changes made to the program but I still had my single sheet scanner and there was no way to test the changes. Some people asked about multiple pages and they got given special instructions, and a warning that it was experimental. There were certain combinations of settings in certain parts of the program that, under the right circumstances, could trigger the multiple page mode.
How is 2.10 different?
I got to try it on a multi-page scanner and it worked really well. So, given that, I’ve changed the internals of CmdTwain so that the default is to scan multiple pages. It still works fine with a single page but, if you load several into a document feeder, it will happily scan as many as you load – all in a single go.
If you’re a programmer using CmdTwain in your own program, it still works the same. You give CmdTwain a filename and it scans a page into that filename. However, if there are more pages, it will scan subsequent pages into filename-0002, filename-0003, etc. All of your existing programs continue to work.
If you’re flicking through the scanned pages, the filenames used also mean that the pages of a document will appear together and in order. Nice.
