Scan pages as searchable PDFs with NAPS2

Earlier this year we wrote about NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner 2), a tiny open source tool which could scan documents to PDF, TIFF and other file formats. We liked the program’s simplicity and ease of use, and in the past few months it’s been further extended with some major new features.

Integrated OCR means you can now make your PDFs searchable. There’s no complex interface to navigate, no manual setting of OCR regions or anything else: just click the OCR button, choose the document language and NAPS2 handles everything else.

An "Import" option allows you to import existing images, optionally process those and save them as PDFs, TIFFs and more.

The command line interface now supports OCR options, too, enabling documents and images to be processed from your own scripts.

New tools include a "reorder" button to interleave your pages. Extra resolution and page size options (including custom page sizes) give finer control over your scans, and one or two notable functionality gaps have been plugged (a right-click menu now allows you to copy scanned pages to the clipboard).

NAPS2 is still very much focused on simplicity, and if your needs are more complex -- maybe OCR’ing old and hard-to-read documents -- then its highly automated approach won’t be much help. But if you’re just looking for an easy way to assemble PDFs from a few scanned pages then it’s now an even better choice.