Would Scandoc be somthing for Extragear?

[Tobias Leupold]

Am Mittwoch, 9. November 2022, 20:22:08 CET schrieb Nate Graham:
> Hello TObias,
> 
> Have you checked out Skanpage? It does PDF scanning, including creating
> multi-page PDF documents out of the scanned files. It also integrates
> with the Purpose framework to offer a simple "Share" menu that lets you
> email scanned documents very quickly.

Hi Nate!

Yes, I also checked Skanpage. However (like stated in the Readme), I can't 
batch post-process in Skanpage to sharpen/adjust the scanned pages and I can't 
fine-tune the size of the resulting images (and thus the resulting PDF). I 
simply needed/wanted a general-purpose scripting interface. Stuff like that 
Tesseract OCR thing can't be done from inside Skanpage (as far as I could 
grasp it).

Also, Scandoc includes handy options on top of KSaneCore for duplex scanning: 
You can define and choose a source for single-page (flat bed) scanning and one 
for duplex scanning, which can be easily switched per scan. Also, you can work 
around an issue some duplex scanners have by rotating all even pages by 180° 
automatically.

It's simply way more use-case specific, and (imo) does it's job better -- for 
that very use-case.
 
> Nate
> 
> On 11/9/22 06:32, Tobias Leupold wrote:
> > 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