Hi all! Nowadays, sending PDFs of scanned documents via email or uploading them somewhere has become a recurring task. For years, I was using shell scripts to kind-of automate scanning, doing some post-processing and conversion -- after a fashion. But I thought that there should be some more straightforward tool for this.
The known general-purpose scanning applications we have didn't do what I wanted to. So, at the beginning of the year, I started to write a quite specialized scanning program whose only purpose is to make scanning documents and turning them into a PDF file as easy as possible. The result is Scandoc. It currently lives at https://invent.kde.org/tleupold/scandoc The Readme contains a description of what it is. It uses KSaneCore to access a scanner and runs (by default well-known) helper programs to post-process the scanned pages and save them as a PDF file. By default, ImageMagick's convert tool is invoked for the colour/sharpness/gamma post-processing and TeX Live's pdfjam is used for the PDF conversion. However one can use any CLI helper program or script for those tasks. E.g. the repository contains an example script to output searchable PDFs by using the Tesseract OCR engine. Scandoc has been used for half a year in production now in my (dentist's) office, and -- from what I heard from the (of course by now only few) users -- it makes this very task of creating PDF files from documents a lot easier and can be used quite conveniently. I thus wondered if this would be something we could need in Extragear. At least, I wanted to share this with you, maybe, someone may find this useful :-) Cheers, Tobias