Scanning

Fake Duplex

Scan two-sided documents on a one-sided scanner in two passes — Neo reorders the pages.

Double-sided documents without a duplex scanner

Fake Duplex makes scanning double-sided documents easy on scanners that can only scan one side at a time. Normally you would have to scan each sheet twice or reorder pages by hand afterwards. With Fake Duplex you scan the whole stack twice — once for the fronts, once for the backs — and PDFScanner Neo does the reordering for you.

Fake Duplex is free for everyone. If your scanner has real duplex hardware, you don’t need it — set Source to Duplex Feeder instead.

How to scan a double-sided stack

1. Scan the front sides. Place the document in the feeder so it scans all odd pages, then start scanning. This captures pages 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on.

2. Flip the stack and scan again. Turn the document around so the back side of the last sheet is scanned first — even if it is empty. This adds all even pages, but in reverse order.

3. Run Fake Duplex. Neo interleaves and reorders the pages automatically into the correct reading order.

If the document has an odd number of pages and the last scanned back side is empty, Fake Duplex detects that final blank page and removes it automatically.

Where to find it

After the second scan pass, choose Fake Duplex from the workspace actions. The first time, Neo shows a short explanation with More Info — a step-by-step illustrated guide — and Run. Check Don’t show again once you know the drill.

Good to know

• Scan both passes with the same settings and don’t reorder pages between the passes — Fake Duplex assumes fronts-then-backs order.
• It operates on the whole document, so run it before mixing in unrelated scans.
• Backs that are genuinely blank (except a detected trailing one) are kept — remove them afterwards with Remove Blank Pages, or let Automatically Remove Blank PagesPro drop them during scanning. See Cleaning up pages.