How to scan documents
From Wildsong
I have a Brother scanner that has a document feed on it. It scans a multipage doc and puts the output into a PDF file on my server via FTP.
- Scan the odd pages, front to back, resulting in a single PDF file.
- Scan the even pages, back to front, resulting in a second PDF file.
- Convert the 2 PDF documents to 2 PS documents. pdftops infile.pdf outfile.ps
- Split the PS documents into separate files, one page per file
- Optionally perform any additional processing on the individual pages, such as image compression
- For WEB version
- Perform OCR on the individual page files so they can be searched separately
- Convert individual pages into PNG files for viewing
- Put all pages into a book viewer collection
- Merge the page files into one PS document
- Convert the merged document back into PDF document
- Perform OCR on the PDF doc
Notes: Commands with '2' like 'pdf2ps' are from the psutils package. Commands with 'to' like 'pdftops' are from the poppler-utils package. I am not sure if tehre are any advantages to use one or the other when there are equivalent commands (for example 'pdf2ps' versus 'pdftops')
Supporting scripts
paginate.pl
I split the documents into separate pages with this perl script.