Not Another PDF Scanner 2 review: Free NAPS2 makes documents scans easier

Windows has built-in support for scanning documents. In fact, it not only supports scanning but positively embraces the endeavor, forcing you to save your scanned documents where it thinks they should go, and perform several extraneous steps every time you want to scan a page. If you find that annoying, you should check out NAPS2, which stands for Not Another PDF Scanner 2.

The NAPS2 interface is as simple as could be.

This free, open-source utility doesn't smother you with guidance. Its bare-bones interface lets you set up multiple scanning profiles, each with its own name, resolution, document size, scan source, and so on. When the time comes to scan, you just pick a profile and scan. The images scanned are imported directly into NAPS2, and you can then save them out as images or as PDFs.

NAPS2 supports several image formats, including JPG, PNG, and even TIFF. PDF support is basic and straightforward: Simply select a number of images and click the Save PDF button to produce a PDF that includes them, one per page. You can control the ordering of the pages via toolbar buttons, but you don't get to tune anything else about the PDF. It's as basic as it gets.

Profiles present many settings, but don't take them too seriously: They may not all work.

Not all profile settings work: Despite setting my Receipts profile to scan documents in greyscale, resulting images were in full color. You can resolve it with a third-party image editor like the free IrfanView, but it's still a minor drawback. I also crashed NAPS2 when opting to scan images using the TWAIN Driver, though WIA support worked well for the most part. You can even choose to use the WIA user interface, which lets you preview the image you are about to scan and optionally crop it prior to scanning.

The WIA user interface lets you preview and crop the image prior to scanning.

The only feature I really missed when using NAPS2 was image straightening: When scanning magazine pages, no matter how hard I tried to position the paper straight, it tended to deform as I closed the scanner lid. Many other scanning applications let you partially rotate the scanned page to compensate for this, but NAPS2 doesn't have such a feature. It does let you rotate the page 90 degrees right or left, but that's useful only if you incorrectly orient the page when putting it on the scanner.

Sometimes less is truly more. NAPS2 keeps a narrow focus, resulting in an app that's so simple it doesn't even have a Settings dialog. If you're simply looking to scan a few documents and like to make your own calls about how and where to save them, NAPS2 handily beats the scanning feature built into Windows 8.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: Utopia Documents makes PDF articles easy to explore, not so much to read

Scientific research is no walk in the park, but anyone who's ever worked in it will agree that finding, reading, and citing articles is one of the most time-consuming tasks. Utopia Documents is a free research utility aimed at making this task easier by offering a PDF reader with built-in exploration tools and other research aids. Although it can be considered as a direct competitor to services like Mendeley, Zotero and ReadCube, Utopia Documents is actually different from all three, and even sports a Mendeley integration.

Utopia Documents loads additional article information in the sidebar.

On the surface, Utopia Documents 2.2.1 looks like a PDF reader, and while you can certainly use it as your main reader, that's not its best point. It lacks simple features such as annotations, highlights, and so forth. Its strength lies in the sidebar, where you'll find extra information about every article you load, helping you research a subject, find related articles, create citations, and more. Start by loading a PDF from your computer, or pasting a PDF URL. Utopia Documents works only with PDFs.

Several seconds after loading an article, information will begin to fill the sidebar. This will change from article to article, but can include the article's metadata, a formatted citation in one of seven available formats (the BibTeX one kept returning "Internal Server Error" when I tried it), an Altmetric rating, telling you how much online discussion this article is attracting, related articles from Mendeley, the article's open access status, and if the article itself is open access, the full reference list, complete with links.

On the bottom left corner you'll find most of the document controls. From here you can toggle the pager for quick browsing through the article; the sidebar; and the figure browser, whichlets you flip through all the article's figures. The figure browser is a brilliant feature—sometimes the figures are all you want to see—but it doesn't always catch all of them in every article, so don't trust it blindly.

Use the Figure Browser to focus on an article's figures.

The program offers several more features for exploring articles, some available only in articles from specific journals. When dealing with articles from Springer, eLife, PLoS or PubMed Central, in-article citations become links that show the full reference without having to look it up in the bibliography. These also includes a link to the article online or to the article's full PDF, if it's open access (a PDF link will open in Utopia Documents). Articles from the Biochemical Journal also include interactive molecules and protein sequences you can play and rotate, and live databases you can export and change. Some articles also come with annotations which hold extra information. Hold down the space bar when reading to see all annotations and special features in the article.

There's no limit on what you can explore, though. Highlight any term within an article, and from the pop-up menu choose "Explore," This brings relevant information to the sidebar, including a Wikipedia entry, formulas, molecular structures, related lab products, related articles from PubMed, and more. The information includes many relevant links, some of which open inside the sidebar itself. The amount of information changes from term to term. You can also search for any term manually by clicking the search icon on the bottom left corner of the page.

Utopia Documents works best with open access articles, as these are most readily available online. You can't import and explore your own PDF collection and you can't use it to download articles from journals you're subscribed to through your institution. That being said, you can manually load any article you can get your hands on, and Utopia Documents will supply its valuable information. Note that the program doesn't have a tabbed interface, so each article sits in a separate window. It gets quite heavy on RAM when multiple articles are open, going as high as 100+MB per window. These comments apply only to the Windows version; vendor Lost Island Labs offers Linux and Mac versions as well, but PCWorld didn't test those.

Highlight any term to find out more about it with the Explore feature.

Utopia Documents is a nice way to explore articles you already have, find related articles and information on your topic, and easily create citations to use elsewhere. You can also copy text directly from a PDF and paste it anywhere without any formatting issues. As a PDF reader, however, it fails to deliver, offering only online comments you need to a registered user in order to use, and no way to highlight, annotate, comment on or bookmark anything in the article. The Explore feature and the wealth of available information, however, make it worth your while to load some articles into Utopia Documents and see what you can discover through it.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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IRIScan Mouse Scans Documents with a Swipe

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From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

How to Draw Pictures or Edit Documents With Your Contacts in Google+ Hangouts

Google+ hangouts  lets you collaborate in real-time with friends, business partners, or other contacts on a drawing or text document. Imagine sketching on a whiteboard to demonstrate a concept to your clients. Picture yourself working through a project plan with coworkers while you video chat with them about its contents.

To create a shared document or picture in a Google hangout:

Create a Google hangout and invite people.Click the Apps button.
Click Google Docs.
Click Create Shared Notes or Create Shared Sketchpad.
Ask your friends to click the Apps tab at the bottom of the screen then Google Docs and select the document or picture you just created.

 

Once you are done drawing or writing your document, it will be saved in your online docs for future use. You can also export the file for offline use.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here