How to scan documents

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.

1. Scan the odd pages, front to back, resulting in a single PDF file.
2. Scan the even pages, back to front, resulting in a second PDF file.
3. Convert the 2 PDF documents to 2 PS documents. pdftops infile.pdf outfile.ps
4. Split the PS documents into separate files, one page per file
5. Optionally perform any additional processing on the individual pages, such as image compression
6. For WEB version
   1. Perform OCR on the individual page files so they can be searched separately
   2. Convert individual pages into PNG files for viewing
   3. Put all pages into a book viewer collection
7. Merge the page files into one PS document
8. Convert the merged document back into PDF document
9. 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.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Separate a postscript file called file.ps into separate pages named file.N.ps
#

$pages = 0;
$rev = 0;

$fname = shift;
if ($fname eq '-r') {
    $rev = 1;
    $fname = shift;
}
print "Processing file $fname\n";
$fname =~ /(.*)\.ps$/;
$base = $1 || die;

# Find number of pages in doc
open(IN,$fname)||die;
while (<IN>){
    if (/^%%Pages: (.*)/) {
	$pages = $1;
	break;
    }
}
close IN;

$p = 0;
$r = $pages;
while ($pages--){
    $p++;

    # This handles docs up to 999 pages
    $p0 = ($rev)? $r : $p;
    if ($p0 < 10) {
	$p0 = '00' . $p0;
    } elsif ($p0 < 100) {
	$p0 = '0' . $p0;
    }
    $cmd = "psselect -p $p $fname $base.$p0.ps";
    print $cmd;
    system($cmd);
    print "\n";

    $r--;
}
bwilson@bellman:~/Magnavox$