Paperless Office on a budget

by Leo Gaggl documentation
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils imagemagick tesseract-ocr pdftk libtiff-tools libsane-extras exactimage wput

Install scanbuttond

Download the “Debian Experimental” package from http://pkgs.org/download/scanbuttond

sudo dpkg -i scanbuttond_0.2.3.cvs20090713-14_i386.deb

This step is only for the Fujitsu ScanSnap support. For other scanners you can probably install from the Ubuntu Repository

Scanner config

vim 40-libsane.rules
#add this line
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04c5", ATTRS{idProduct}=="11a2", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

Permissions

sudo adduser saned scanner

Useful command lines for troubleshooting

Since I had a few trouble getting this scanner to work properly I found the following commands highly useful in locating the issue.

man sane-usb
sane-find-scanner
scanimage -L
dmesg
tail /var/log/udev

NOTE: If you are using a notebook devices be careful as I spent quite a few hours troubleshooting an error when opening the device from saned. It turned out to be that the USB power-management on the Toshiba notebook caused havoc with saned (http://askubuntu.com/questions/55140/error-during-device-i-o-when-using-usb-scanner). Switching to the desktop that is now housing the scanner fixed that problem. Thank you VIRTUALBOX (I ended up setting up a dedicated VM for this task) !

Configure scanbuttond

vim /etc/default/scanbuttond
#change this line from no to yes
RUN=yes

cd /etc/scanbuttond
sudo cp initscanner.sh.example initscanner.sh
sudo vim initscanner.sh

Uncomment or copy any scanner init command(s).

sudo cp buttonpressed.sh.example buttonpressed.sh
sudo vim buttonpressed.sh

Copy the contents of the scan script below. The script is also hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/blob/master/buttonpressed.sh)

Scan script

#!/bin/bash
OUT_DIR=/output/directory/name
TMP_DIR=`mktemp -d`
FILE_NAME=scan_`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`
LANGUAGE="eng"
echo 'scanning...'
scanimage --resolution 300 
          --batch="$TMP_DIR/scan_%03d.pnm" 
          --format=pnm 
          --mode Gray 
          --source 'ADF Duplex'
echo "Output saved in "$TMP_DIR/scan*.pnm"
cd $TMP_DIR
# cut borders
echo 'cutting borders...'
for i in scan_*.pnm; do
    mogrify -shave 50x5 "${i}"
done
# check if there is blank pages
echo 'checking for blank pages...'
for f in ./*.pnm; do
    unpaper --size "a4" --overwrite "$f" `echo "$f" | sed 's/scan/scan_unpaper/g'`
    #need to rename and delete original since newer versions of unpaper can't use same file name
    rm -f "$f"
done
# apply text cleaning and convert to tif
echo 'cleaning pages...'
for i in scan_*.pnm; do
    echo "${i}"
    convert "${i}" -contrast-stretch 1% -level 29%,76% "${i}.tif"
done
# Starting  OCR
echo 'doing OCR...'
for i in scan_*.pnm.tif; do
    echo "${i}"
    tesseract "$i" "$i" -l $LANGUAGE hocr
    hocr2pdf -i "$i" -s -o "$i.pdf"

Credits:

A big thank you & hat tip to the following authors of the following pages:

EDIT (2013-09-16): I found this link describing how to remove empty pages: http://philipp.knechtges.com/?p=190 – might have to investigate this when I have some time.

Webmentions

No webmentions yet. Be the first to send a webmention !

What's this?