Scanner: a Windows scanning app that edits before it saves

A rewrite is underway, and the README says so first

The first thing in the README is a note, and it changes how you should read everything after it. The project is being rewritten from the ground up with lots of changes happening in quick succession, and as a result the current app is in maintenance mode and contributions will probably not reach the release channel. Pre-release versions of v4 are available in the Releases section.

That is an unusual thing for a README to lead with, and it is useful. It means the app in the Microsoft Store is a finished product that is no longer where the effort goes, and the v4 packages in the Releases section are the future, at least in preview form.

The release history makes the two tracks visible. Tag 3.2.9.0 is described as a Hebrew localization release from 2024-11-18 and belongs to the current, stable line. The newer tags, 4.0.1.0 as Preview 1 in August 2026 and 4.0.2.0 as Preview 2 in October 2026, belong to the rewrite. The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-10-18, so work on the new version continues.

The technology choices follow the platform. The topics list csharp, dotnet, windows, winui, xaml, fluent-design and mvvm, and the repository holds a Scanner/ project, a separate ImageToPDF/ project, a Scanner.Package/ directory and a UnitTests/ directory. The tag line calls it an all-in-one scanner app built for the Universal Windows Platform.

WIA is the compatibility boundary that decides everything

The feature list opens with the single constraint that matters most: support for all WIA-compatible scanners, which the README glosses as probably almost every regular consumer scanner in use today.

That is a deliberate scoping decision, and it cuts both ways. On the positive side it means the app does not require a specific vendor, a specific model or a bundled driver, which is why a single small application can talk to the flatbed on a desk that has been sitting there for a decade. There is no driver to install, and no per-scanner configuration.

On the negative side, WIA is the compatibility surface, and everything the app can do is bounded by what that interface exposes. The README claims that almost every regular consumer scanner is covered, which is a claim about the installed base of consumer hardware rather than a guarantee for any particular device. If your scanner is driven by a vendor utility rather than by the Windows imaging stack, whether the app sees it is something you have to check on your own machine, and the README does not list unsupported or partially supported models.

The rest of the feature set builds on that foundation rather than on the device. Automatic rotation of scanned pages, immediate display of the result after scanning, and saving multiple pages into a single PDF or as separate images are all software-side behaviours. Only the capture step depends on the hardware.

So the practical test before installing is narrow and quick: check that your scanner shows up as a WIA device on your Windows machine. Everything else about the app's usefulness is independent of that.

The editor is the actual product

Most scanner apps stop at the capture step and hand you a file. This one puts an editor between the glass and the export, and the feature list devotes more words to it than to the scanning itself.

The built-in editor can crop and rotate, including multiple pages at once. You can draw and highlight with Windows Ink, which means annotations are stylus input rather than typed markup. You can rename files and delete pages, reorder PDF pages, and edit both PDFs and image files in the same place, which the README describes as editing both formats together.

The surrounding flow supports that. Scanned pages are automatically rotated, so a misaligned stack does not become a misaligned document. You see the result immediately after scanning, which matters when you are feeding a stack of paper into a feeder and want to know whether page four came out straight. And the final step is not a file dialog but a choice: share or copy your scans, or continue editing in another app.

The combination is what makes this more than a capture utility. For a person scanning a signed form, the workflow is capture, crop to the signature block, highlight a clause, rotate a page that fed in skewed, and export one PDF. Each of those steps is a line in the feature list and a button in the interface rather than a separate application and a second export-and-reimport cycle.

The cost of that scope is that the editor has to handle two document models, PDF pages and raster images, at once, which is where the complexity of the rewrite most likely lives.

Where to get it: the Store, the Releases, or the source

The download section is short and lays out three routes. The stable version of the app is available in the Microsoft Store, all release packages are published in the Releases section of the GitHub repository, and you can view the source code of both the stable and work-in-progress versions on GitHub.

That last point is worth expanding for anyone who cares about their documents. A scanning app is trusted with whatever paper passes across the glass, and the fact that the store build and the work-in-progress build are both readable source is unusual for a consumer Windows utility. The repository also includes a UnitTests/ directory, so there is a test suite in the tree, and a privacy policy page is published under the project site.

The project site itself is part of the repository, with a _config.yml at the root indicating a GitHub Pages setup for the help pages, the donate page and the translation guide.

If you want to support the work, the README points at a donation page. The only credit line is the banner image, attributed to Microsoft Edge on Unsplash, which tells you something about the tone of the project: this is a well-finished small utility rather than a corporate product.

For a first-time user, the Store is the low-risk route and the Releases section is where the v4 previews live. For a developer, the source is where the rewrite is happening.

Translations show the audience the app does not have

The languages list is long enough to be worth reading. It includes Tunisian Arabic, Catalan, Simplified Chinese across several regional variants, Czech, Dutch, English and English for the United Kingdom, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Ukrainian.

That is twenty-six locales, and the distribution is informative. Several are languages of countries with large scanner-adoption markets or specific document cultures, and the presence of Tunisian Arabic and several Chinese variants points at a user base that is not primarily anglophone. The Hebrew locale was worth its own release tag, 3.2.9.0, which suggests it was a contributed translation that got a dedicated build rather than a silent addition.

The README also links a page for people who want to improve existing translations or add new ones, which means the localisation is community driven and the maintainer is asking for help rather than running a translation service.

For an adopter, this matters in a specific way. A scanning app's interface is where people who do not read English still get stuck, and an application that reads documents in many languages while its interface stays half-translated is a real friction point. The list here suggests the maintainer treats localisation as part of the product rather than as a post-release chore.

The interface itself is described as crafted for Windows 11, and the topics include fluent-design and winui, so the visual language follows the current Windows design system rather than a custom skin.

Editorial conclusion

Scanner fits a Windows user who scans regularly, owns a WIA-compatible consumer scanner and wants a PDF with cropping, rotation and annotation in one application without installing a separate editor. It is the wrong choice if your scanner needs a vendor driver that does not expose WIA, and it is the wrong choice to build a long-lived workflow on, because the stable app is in maintenance mode and contributions will probably not reach the release channel. Before adopting, check that your device appears as a WIA scanner on your machine, note that the stable version is the one in the Microsoft Store while v4 is only in the Releases section, and read the licence, since the project is MPL-2.0 and the source for both the stable and work-in-progress versions is published on GitHub.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MPL-2.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. simon-knuth/scanner on GitHub