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scan2file README
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scan2file is a command line utility for Linux mainly useful to scan pages from
a flatbed scanner. It executes the various commands needed for scanning and
converting the image to a pnm, tif or pdf file. It also can be used to directly
print out the scanned page or for OCR (optical character recognition).

Depending on the features you want to use you need to install most or all of the
following commands (packages) on your system:
- scanimage (sane-utils)
- pnmflip, pnmtotiff (netpbm)
- tiffset, tiffcp, tiff2pdf (libtiff-tools)
- pdftk (pdftk)
- pdfopt (ghostscript)
- pdftops (xpdf-utils)
- lp, lpstat (cups-client)
- tesseract (tesseract-ocr with language files)

The -h option shows you the usage instructions for scan2file.

For normal photocopying use the default values for -m and -r.

If you have to edit the scanned page (i.e. because of bad quality or wrong
size) then you can:
1) Scan the image to a pnm file, i.e. with '-m gray -o tmpscan.pnm'.
2) Edit it, i.e. using The Gimp, Menu 'Colors - Curves...'.
3) Proceed with the edited image, i.e. with '-d tmpscan.pnm -o out.pdf'.
   If the pnm image does not fit into the page size of your pdf output
   file try to alter the resolution using the -r option.

In the folder examples/scanbuttond/ you can find some example scripts to turn
your scanner into a digital copier using scan2file in conjunction with
scanbuttond.
