merging pdfs from a one sided scanner

[tsttm]

hey guys, just thought I'd see if anybody might have any suggestions.

these days I've had little need to scan books so I moved away for my diy scanner. I have recently purchased a multifunction scanner (hp officejet 8500A) which has a feeder that only scans single-sided. it can create PDFs either as a single PDF of multiple pages that are fed or multiple PDF files from each page.

I'm wondering if anybody has ideas from a software/workflow point of view to easily scan double-sided. For instance, right now I would have to manually use a pdf editor to insert individual pages or combine pages. It's quite tedious. Is there a software that could easily do this step after the fact or perhaps there's a scanning software that would know to do this during the scan?

Any suggestions for postprocessing workflow also appreciated.

thanks guys!

[tsttm]

I seem to have answered my own question. After searching around, an option in nitro pdf where you can create PDF from scanner. there, there's an option to scan 'front and back' and that way it knows to scan a series of sheets, then you flip the pages over and then scan a second set of sheets. At the end, it knows to arrange them in the correct order.

I'd still be interested in hearing other software or workflows I can do this.

[strider1551]

Ahaha... wow. I just purchased a new multifunction printer yesterday. My old one could do duplex ADF scanning but the new one sadly can't (at least in Linux, I swear reviews said it could scan duplex... or maybe it only copies duplex for some reason). In my spare moments throughout the day I've been piecing together a script to make scanning a duplex document easier.

What operating system are you using? Sounds like you are scanning right to PDF files... what I basically do is scan to TIF into an odd directory and an even directory, then move the first odd file into the parent directory as page-00001.tif, then the last even file as page-00002.tif, and so on. Once they're all in one directory and properly ordered I make a PDF or DJVU file from there.

Edit: Oh, you answered before I could finish writing. Yeah, that's the basic idea - scan one side, flip, scan next side, reorder.