[sane-devel] scanning for archival and OCR

[Rolf Bensch]

Hi David,

I would install scanbd (http://sourceforge.net/projects/scanbd/). Then
you can use the scanner buttons to control scanning with Sane. scanbd is
calling shell scripts, so you can write your own scrips matching your needs.

You can ask this mailing list if you have problems with scanbd (please
search the ml history before ;) ).

Cheers,
Rolf


Am 22.01.2013 18:34, schrieb David H. Durgee:
> Now that I have my Canon PIXMA MG2120 working as a scanner I was looking
> at the possibility of using it to scan some documents for archival
> purposes.  My intent is to scan some old bills and other documents and
> database them in some manner before disposing of the originals.  As
> these are mostly bills and other documents they tend to be B&W with the
> possible exception of some logos or letter head/foot in color.
> 
> I am trying to determine how best to scan and save these documents. I
> would like to be able to reprint them in the future if that becomes
> necessary, implying a high quality scan.  But I am also concerned with
> the size of the saved documents on my system.  What is the best file
> format for saving such documents?  I would imagine that 16 or possibly
> even 8 colors would suffice to represent the documents, assuming the
> palette can be specified.  The documents are likely to be mostly
> white-space, so I would expect them to be highly compressible.
> 
> Given I am interested in databasing them I would also think that using
> an OCR program to extract the content would be useful.  I tried a few
> things with that on a small document and encountered problems, given the
> mixed content of the particular document.  Are there any specific
> recommendations for scanning a document with OCR in mind?  As I am
> running linux I am looking at tesseract and cuneiform at this point, at
> least one of which wants a B&W document for input and whose results
> appear to vary quite a bit with the scan resolution.
> 
> Am I dealing with conflicting goals?  Will I need to scan each document
> twice or more to accomplish what I want here?
> 
> Dave
> 
>