Patent ID: 7469895

Claim:
A document feeding apparatus, comprising: a document feeding tray to stack documents thereon; a paper forwarding device to sequentially forward each of the documents one by one, in a conveying direction of the documents; a document detector to detect a presence or absence of each of the documents stacked on the document feeding tray and a length of the documents in the conveying direction of the documents; and a controller to control the paper forwarding device; wherein when determining that the length of the documents is equal to or greater than a predetermined length in the conveying direction of the documents, the controller controls the paper forwarding device so that the paper forwarding device starts an operation for feeding a next document after the controller has confirmed a fact that the document detector detected a presence of the next document on the document feeding tray; and wherein when determining that the length of the documents is smaller than the predetermined length, the controller controls the paper forwarding device so that the paper forwarding device starts the operation for feeding the next document before the controller confirms the fact that the document detector detects the presence of the next document on the document feeding tray.