How do I scan to PDF?

Picture of a scanner

Creating PDF documents

Why scan to PDF? - we often get asked to help students who are submitting some kind of application to a third party which contains pictures, signatures and text. All this information can be scanned into a PDF file which can then be emailed to a third party rather than faxed. The end user needs a PDF viewer to open the document which are free and easily downloadable e.g. Adobe Acrobat.

From the HP Director window select the 'Scan Document' option. You will be presented with the following options :

  • Select Text & Graphic(s) as Image - (200 ppi millions of colours (24 bit))
  • Text as Image - (200 ppi 256 grey shades (8 bit grey scale))
  • Editable Text - (300 ppi 256 grey shades (8 bit grey scale)
  • Editable Text with Graphics(s) - (300 ppi millions of colours (24 bit))

You should select the option that best fits your situation. The main difference between all of these options is the size of the resulting file and the quality of the PDF image and colour or black and white.

Once the scanner completes its first scan of the glass you should see the following window (below) which will display your image. In this window you can choose what area you actually want scanned by 'grabbing' the black squares on the dotted selection zone and resizing the window. The area that will not be scanned will be grayed out. In this example we have selected the middle part of the image that we want.


HP Scan Director

Click the 'Accept' icon to finalize the scan. Once scanned you will then be asked if you want to add another page to the current document. If you have more pages to scan to create a multi page PDF document then click 'Yes' and you will repeat the process above.

When you click 'No' to indicate that this is the last page, you will be prompted to save your document. Give your document a name and make sure the save location is in your home directory. You also need to change the 'Save as type' to PDF (*.pdf) by selecting it from the drop down box.


Once your PDF file has been saved check that it looks ok in Adobe Acrobat.


Further information on scanning can be found on the Computing Service web pages.