When I wrote my recent Canon P–215 review, I mostly focussed on the hardware and the scanning. I wasn’t able to spend too much time on the CaptureOnTouch software that is included with the scanner, so I’m going to rectify that now.
By the way, while my review was for the P–215, I believe this software also comes with the Canon P–150 and the DR-C125.
The first thing to note is that if you want to make any changes to the setup, the scanner needs to be connected and turned on. I’m not sure why you can’t edit your jobs without that, but there you go.
Menu Bar
If all you want to do is do a quick scan, the software adds a handy menu bar icon.
You can initiate a scan using your pre-defined jobs (more on that below) without having to launch the software itself.
The Window
The CaptureOnTouch window is made up of two main sections. On the left is your list of Jobs, and on the right are your settings for that job.
What Is A “Job”?
In Canon parlance, a Job is a pre-defined group of settings that you can map to a specific task. For example, you can have a Job that scans photos to iPhoto, a Job that scans documents to Evernote, a Job that scans PDFs to a certain folder, a Job that scans double-sided documents to one per PDF, etc.
I am a big fan of taking advantage of pre-defined Jobs or Profiles if your scanner software supports them. They are a big productivity boost.
Scan First
At the top of the Job list, there is a special pre-defined Job titled Scan First. That is a simple way for you to do a quick scan without having to mess around with settings.
It sets everything to Auto, and associates that Job with the physical Scan button on the scanner.
By the way, you will notice that that setting is available to any of your Jobs.
If you have a certain Job that you use all the time, you can change that setting and make it so that when you put a piece of paper in the scanner and hit the Scan button, it uses your selected Job. Nice touch.
Output Options
When you create your job, you can choose how you want the document or image to be output.
You can save it to a folder, email it, print it, save it to Google Docs, or send it to a specific application.
If you want to save it to an application, you can either use one of their pre-defined Applications, or add your own.
You have a lot of control over the output settings. You can choose the folder where the file gets saved to, and can choose the naming format.
I couldn’t see a way to save the date with underscores in it, which is my preferred way of doing it.
You can save the file to PDF, JPEG, or TIFF.
If you are saving to PDF, you have control over how the PDF is created. There are options to either save all the pages in one file, or split every x pages. You can also turn OCR on or off, or change the OCR language.
Scanner Settings
By default, the pre-defined Jobs have Full Auto Mode set to On.
What is Full Auto Mode? Here is how Canon describes it:
The Full Auto Mode automatically detects document size and the corresponding scanning resolution, skips blank pages, straightens images scanned at an angle, determines whether to save images in colour and rotates images to the correct text orientation.
If you don’t want, this, you can turn the setting to Off, in which case a Scanner setting button will appear.
When you hit the new button, you can control how the actual scanning happens for this Job.
If that isn’t enough, there are even more advanced settings which I won’t get into here.
The Software
As you can see, the CaptureOnTouch software that comes with the Canon imageFORMULA scanners (in my case, the Canon P–215) gives you a lot of flexibility for your particular scanning workflow.
One thing I appreciate it is that a lot of the options are hidden from the user unless they specifically want to see them. A nice touch that will help new users avoid being overwhelmed.
Any Canon users out there? How do you like the software?