Would Scandoc be somthing for Extragear?

[Tobias Leupold]

Hi all!

Nowadays, sending PDFs of scanned documents via email or uploading them 
somewhere has become a recurring task. For years, I was using shell scripts to 
kind-of automate scanning, doing some post-processing and conversion -- after 
a fashion. But I thought that there should be some more straightforward tool 
for this.

The known general-purpose scanning applications we have didn't do what I 
wanted to. So, at the beginning of the year, I started to write a quite 
specialized scanning program whose only purpose is to make scanning documents 
and turning them into a PDF file as easy as possible. 

The result is Scandoc. It currently lives at
https://invent.kde.org/tleupold/scandoc

The Readme contains a description of what it is. It uses KSaneCore to access a 
scanner and runs (by default well-known) helper programs to post-process the 
scanned pages and save them as a PDF file. By default, ImageMagick's convert 
tool is invoked for the colour/sharpness/gamma post-processing and TeX Live's 
pdfjam is used for the PDF conversion. However one can use any CLI helper 
program or script for those tasks. E.g. the repository contains an example 
script to output searchable PDFs by using the Tesseract OCR engine.

Scandoc has been used for half a year in production now in my (dentist's) 
office, and -- from what I heard from the (of course by now only few) users -- 
it makes this very task of creating PDF files from documents a lot easier and 
can be used quite conveniently.

I thus wondered if this would be something we could need in Extragear.
At least, I wanted to share this with you, maybe, someone may find this useful 
:-)

Cheers, Tobias