Scanning multiple pages into a single PDF
I have a Brother DCP-L2540DW combined scanner, copier, and laser printer unit. It’s been a great little unit I picked up for about $100 on a Black Friday sale that has cheap cartridges and loads of features for the occasional printing/copy job. On a side note, laser printers are a FAR better option than inkjet printers if you only occasionally print something. Now that good laser printers are below $100 and their toner is far more stable than inkjet printers that dry up and clog if not used regularly, they’re really the way to go for occasional everyday printing.
Recently I had to scan in about 100 pages of text and wanted to scan them in a single PDF document. Low and behold, the Brother toolkit provides a way to stack up all the documents in the feeding tray, scan the whole lot, and then automatically output a single paginated PDF document. Really awesome!
Instructions:
- Install and click on the Brother Utilities provided with the printer:
- Click ControlCenter4 to open the Control Center 4 app.
- On the Scan top menu, click the button for the type of scan that you would like to perform. For a multi-page PDF, you want to select File. A new dialog box will open:
- Be sure to change the File Type to PDF and then select the folder you want to save the document.
- Load the upper tray with the pages you want to scan. I’ve scanned up to 40 pages simultaneously this way without issue.
- Press the Scan button and the bottom and it will scan all the pages and combine them into a single PDF that is located in the folder set in the Scan Location directory you specified.
If you have enabled the ‘Show settings dialog before scan’ option, then you will be prompted to choose your desired settings and then click Start Scanning.
If you are using the Continuous Scanning option, you will need to load the subsequent pages either on the flatbed or in the Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) if available and then click Continue. Once you have scanned all pages, click Finish.