[sane-devel] How to combine scanned images together and printthem as a file

abel deuring a.deuring@satzbau-gmbh.de
Tue, 04 Mar 2003 13:54:42 +0100


Stephen Liu wrote:

> What I need is a platform to keep all scanned images, stacking them page
> after page, removing or re-inserting the pages if required.  Finally
> printing them as a pdf file.

I think that there is no free software based out-of-the-box solution
available. But you can combine a number of useful free software packages
to get the job done: Sane for image aquisition; and tools like
ImageMagick, the pnmtools or similar for image format conversion.
Ghostscript can produce PDF files, provided that you have Postscript
data available -- and there is more than one way to write Postscript
files from "pixel images". Other members of this mailing list have
already mentioned them.

You can "glue" these programs with shell scripts, written for bash, csh
or the Korn shell. Alternatively, yxou can use a more advanced scripting
languages like Perl, Python or Ruby to get the job done. Python has even
its own "pixel image manipulation" package, called PIL. (The other
languages may have similar tools, but I am not aware of any.)

> 
> Whether you meant starting scanning direct from Gimp and use the latter
> as platform to do all job.
> 
> One more important job is data searching on the scanned images.  On
> PaperPort (a Windows application).  You can create a database bank on
> all scanned images kept on its platform and do data searching.  Is there
> similar application on Linux.

Have a look at Gift (GNU Image-Finding Tool): 
http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/gift.html It's in a quite early
development stage though.

If you simply need a sort of a "photo gallery", you might look for some
web applications. There are probably PHP-based solutions available;
alternatively you might try Zope (http://www.zope.org) and one of its
additional products for photo galleries. (But I should mention that Zope
is quite complex beast...)

Abel