From the Archives

How To: Scan to PDF for Free

Originally published on golod.com · lightly refreshed 2026

A note from Jason: This one's been kicking around golod.com for years and people still land on it, so I dusted it off, cleaned up the formatting, and left the how-to itself alone. The tools have moved on a bit since I wrote it, but the approach still works. — JG

Today we are going to learn how to use free software to scan a single or multiple page document to a PDF. This is great if you have an old flatbed scanner laying around like I do.

Danielle asked me if we could scan a document to PDF recently and I forgot I had a nice "old" Epson Perfection 1650 flatbed scanner laying around (well preserved). I have been spoiled in recent times because we had a very nice enterprise-level printer/scanner at the office with a 50-page document feeder on it. It would man-handle a 2-page document and email it to me almost faster than I could make it back to my desk. These days, we are rollin' with the Perfection 1650 flatbed… OG style, homey.

The search for free scanning to PDF begins

I start with the standard Google search for "scan to pdf" and it brought up a number of different applications, all commercial, with some free offerings. Most had some kind of free PDF-creation application that tied into Windows' printing function — allowing you to select a PDF "printer" just like Adobe Acrobat does, except without the big price tag. All of the top Google results did not have a free scan-to-PDF application. Some had trialware, but they all watermark the image that is created so that you will buy the application… and I am being cheap today.

A quick note: I'm not going to name the sites that watermarked scans, because one of them claimed to be a "full functioning version," then slapped a big black stripe across the PDF the moment I tried to print and prompted me to buy. I'll say that CutePDF has a free version people like, and that's what I use to generate the PDFs in my solution.

The free scanner-to-PDF solution: iCopy + CutePDF

I finally came across an article on scanning that listed an open-source project called iCopy. iCopy is billed as a "free photocopier," and that's pretty much how I see it. All of the applications I installed to scan items watermarked scans that were output to image files as well as those output as PDF files. iCopy outputs everything to an image file, and then I use the free CutePDF creator to "print" to a PDF. Let's look at the process.

Update: Matteo Rossi dropped by the comments to note that significant improvements were made in version 1.5 of iCopy, including support for ADF (Automatic Document Feeders).

How to use iCopy

When you first install iCopy you have the option to let the button on your scanner "notify" iCopy of the coming scan. None of the other applications I used had this functionality (that I could see). iCopy makes it easy. Once installed, the main application is small, clean and simple.

There is not a lot going on, and only the necessary items are in front of you. The first drop-down lets you specify what the scanner should look for: Colors, Grayscale, or Text. Colors makes for a slower scanning pass, grayscale a little faster, and text much faster. The Printer drop-down offers color or black-and-white. The Paper Size drop-down covers sizes you know and sizes you've never heard of (and probably never will again) — they've got you covered no matter what you're scanning.

Configuring iCopy

The first order of business is to configure the scanner. I was fortunate to find a Windows 7 TWAIN driver for the Epson Perfection 1650 on the Epson website, and clicking the "Choose scanner…" button revealed the scanner straight away.

Next, configure the printer options. Clicking "Printer Options" brings up the standard Windows printer-selection window. I selected CutePDF Writer so that when I scan and print the documents, PDF files are generated automatically. Note: it can take a bit for CutePDF Writer to spit out the PDF depending on the resolution you select — be patient, fast clickers. This printer is saved as the default for iCopy, not for Windows.

Last, configure the image settings. You can change the Brightness, Contrast, Scaling, Resolution and JPEG quality (since it's creating an image when scanning). I left the first three alone but stepped the resolution up to 600 dpi. That made for pretty nice scans that weren't outrageously big. You can select resolutions from 75 dpi up to 1600 dpi. One nice touch: the main screen shows you which scanner and which printer you have selected — not something you normally find, but thoughtful and useful.

Scanning and making a multi-page PDF

Now that everything is set up, it's time to make a PDF. A single-page scan is easy enough — click the big blue button on the main screen and iCopy starts the scan. Alternately, if your scanner has a scan button on front that iCopy recognizes, push that bad boy and away you go.

But if you're scanning a document, chances are there's more than one page. In that case click the "Other Scan Modes" button directly below the big blue button. This brings up two choices: Scan Multiple Pages (Ctrl + M) or Scan to a File. Option #1 is what we want for a multi-page file; Option #2 creates an image file for a single-page scan rather than outputting to a printer. Selecting "Scan Multiple Pages" activates the scan process, so have your document in the scanner first. Once the first page is done: click "Add Another Page" to keep going, or "Print Pages" to output to a PDF using CutePDF Writer (or your PDF creator of choice).

Final thoughts

Overall this is a very workable and simple system if you're too cheap and too lazy to buy a dedicated document scanner. The PDFs I created with this combination were quite nice and worked well for our needs.

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