Win 7 Fax and Scan...saving as PDF instead of TIFF

[OBIO]

A while back I upgraded 2 of my brother-in-law's systems from Vista to Win 7 (he LOVES Win 7). He called me a bit ago and asked if I could find a way for his incoming faxes to be saved as PDFs instead of TIFFs. He uses Windows Fax and Scan to handle his faxing and scanning. Is there a way to save the incoming faxes as PDFs without having to use a converter to convert them one at a time to PDF? He gets over 2 dozen lengthy faxes a day in connection with his commercial plumbing business and does not have time to convert hundreds of pages of faxes a day.

OBIO

[Moparmike]

You should be able to use pretty much any PDF creation software to do the conversion. Adobe Acrobat ain't cheap though...luckily there are some lower-cost and open-source PDF creation options out there!

Basically, most of them work by installing a "virtual printer" type of interface.
From whatever application you're running, like the Scan/Fax Wizard, MS Word, Excel, etc..., you would open the file you want to convert (in your case a scanned image) and choose the "Print" option. When it asks which printer you want to use you will select the PDF Creation virtual printer instead of your hardware printer (inkjet/laser/etc).

Going way back to my Win98 days, I've had a copy of OfficeReady Pro that does this. It works on XP but I haven't gotten around to installing it on my Win7 rig so I'm not sure if I would need to upgrade it or not. It was a PCMag bonus software when I picked it up, otherwise the current version is around $40.

There are several open-source PDF creators out there too that might be worth checking out.
PDFForge PDFCreator http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator
PDF24 Creator http://en.pdf24.org/
These are two that I've been eyeballing in case OfficeReady doesn't work for me anymore. Haven't tried em yet though.

Openoffice.Org also has PDF creation plug-ins but you would need to open each scanned TIFF in OoO's Draw program and chose 'Export as PDF' from the menu. It works good, but one of the 'virtual printer' type utilities would probably be more in line with what you guys are looking for.

[Moparmike]

Another option you guys might have is to print the faxes as XPS documents.

This depends on if there is a "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" virtual printer installed on the computer. I don't remember if this comes with Win7 or if it was installed when I installed Office2007.
Win7 and Vista have an XPS Viewer app included with it, and if you need to view XPS docs on an XP machine you can download the viewer here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx

Either this or the PDF plug-in method isn't really what you're looking for, but it's about the only options that I know of to get scans and faxes (TIF/TIFFs) into a format that you can export to another machine.



I guess the first question I should've asked is why do you need the PDF option? What problems do you have with just saving the scans/faxes as TIF files? Is filesize the issue?

[OBIO]

When the faxes are saved as TIFFs, my BIL can only view and read the first page, unless he prints the fax out. Having to print a couple hundred pages of plumbing prices and specs and such every day creates one huge pile of disorganization. Having the faxes in PDF format, he can read them on his system, save them in the folders of which ever project they pertain to.

OBIO

[Moparmike]

I see. That would definitely be a pain.

I did a little more googling and found that others are wondering the same thing...and not finding much. WF&S is a pretty simple utility with not many options.

I don't have any multi-page faxes to look at on my rig (I don't do any faxing with my machine), what happens to them if you would print them as XPS format? Can you view multiple pages then?


More info on XPS...
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/xpsview_win7.mspx

[Wiens]

Try: www.cutepdf.com (http://www.cutepdf.com)

Kevin

[gigabyte]

A while back I upgraded 2 of my brother-in-law's systems from Vista to Win 7 (he LOVES Win 7). He called me a bit ago and asked if I could find a way for his incoming faxes to be saved as PDFs instead of TIFFs. He uses Windows Fax and Scan to handle his faxing and scanning. Is there a way to save the incoming faxes as PDFs without having to use a converter to convert them one at a time to PDF? He gets over 2 dozen lengthy faxes a day in connection with his commercial plumbing business and does not have time to convert hundreds of pages of faxes a day.

OBIO

OBIO, I had this problem at work, we use a Fax2eMail service to handle all incoming faxes (saves a ton of paper, and is very convenient), and we had the same problem. If you want to avoid the extra steps of converting tiff files into pdf, you might want to change the file association to have tiff files open with "Windows Photo Viewer" that will give him the option of using a Page forward & Page Back buttons at the bottom of the screen, or if he has MS Office, there is one better, change it to "Microsoft Office Picture Manager" that gives you the ability to use Page forward and Back, plus Thumbnail views and a few other nice little options, including printing selected pages.

If you need a hand to make that change PM me and I'll do up a Win 7 cheat sheet for you to follow.