ScanTailor OCR 1.0.9

What's new

Project files

• Projects are saved as version 10. Projects of ScanTailor Advanced 1.2 and of older versions of ScanTailor OCR (version 4) still open. ScanTailor Advanced no longer opens projects saved by ScanTailor OCR, so it can't drop their additional settings.
• Projects are saved safely: the old file is replaced only when the new one is completely written.

Split Pages: page order

• New group "Page Order" (left half first or right half first) with picture buttons, for the whole project. It replaces the menu item "Reverse Two-Page Spread Order" and the check box "Right to left layout".
• Switching renames the existing output files and thumbnails, so they aren't created again.
• The Default Parameters window sets the page order of new projects.

Missing images and Fix DPI

• When images of a project are missing, the relinking window opens: the output folder and a tree of the image folders with "Show missing only". A folder or file is relinked as a whole, with a path field or "Locate ...". Changes apply at once.
• Fix DPI of All Images shows one folder tree with traffic light icons and the filter "Show only pages that need fixing".

Output

• "Reduce colors" (None, Posterize, K-means) under "Color Operations": K-means reduces colored text to a few clean colors (idea from ScanTailor Experimental).
• "Colored" for all binarization methods: darkens colored pixels so colored text comes out black; negative values lighten them, so colored stamps or highlighter marks disappear. The lower and upper bounds apply to all methods.
• Removing pages, replacing a scan or switching between one and two pages deletes the output files in all folders together with their thumbnails.
• Dewarping prefers models that make the text lines horizontal.

Select Content

• New option "Ignore page box during detection": text touching the page box is no longer removed with the border. Taken from ScanTailor Advanced pull request ScanTailor-Advanced#182.

Deskew

• The oblique correction now shears by the whole measured angle instead of half of it. Manual oblique angles of older projects now shear twice as much.
• Switching oblique to "Auto" measures the page.

Other

• Settings: one limit "Processor threads" for all parallel work.
• The window title shows the version.
• All texts and the German translation reviewed for consistent names. Only English and German remain; the six incomplete translations were removed.
• Icons and thumbnails are sharp on scaled screens.

Fixes

• A change that kept the file size closed the project without asking; "Save" closed the project even when saving failed.
• Inserting pages next to split scans, the order of several inserted files, a crash in "Go to Page".
• File names with long numbers (e.g. time stamps) are sorted correctly. This can change the page order in projects with inconsistent file names.
• An endless loop in dewarping with short text lines.
• Many smaller fixes found by static analysis (compiler warnings, clang-tidy, cppcheck, sanitizers, CodeQL).

Downloads

• Windows: portable ZIP, unpack and run scantailor-ocr.exe.
• Linux: .deb package and AppImage, built automatically and untested.

Full Changelog: v1.0.8...v1.0.9

ScanTailor OCR 1.0.8

What's new

Output: color mode

• The color mode is chosen with three picture buttons (black and white, color / grayscale, mixed) instead of a list; the tooltip names the mode.
• New panel "Color Mode Detection": "Detect ..." sets the color mode of chosen pages. It is based on ScanTailor Spectre (Leptonica), extended so that colored headings alone don't make a color page and light, small or dark photos are found (picture zones as a second opinion). The settings apply to all projects. Needs OCR (Tesseract).
• The thumbnails of the Output step can be ordered by color mode.

Output: photo adjustments (idea from ScanTailor Spectre)

• New panel "Photo Adjustments" with the sliders of a photo editor: temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. They are applied to the finished output, so black and white text, picture detection and OCR are not affected. In mixed mode only the picture zones are changed. "Keep white" keeps a white background white.

Output: new filters (from ScanTailor Experimental)

• "Remove color noise", "Even out background" (with "Make paper white"), "KNN denoiser" and "Sharpen" under "Enhancement".
• Five new binarization methods: Gatos, Nick, Singh, Robust and MultiScale; every method has a tooltip saying what it suits.
• "Even out letter widths" for dewarping: letters near the spine no longer come out too narrow.
• The enhancement filters run on all cores and after dewarping.

Margins: output size and scaling

• New panel "Output Size": per page "Match size" (Off / Fill with margins / Scale). "Scale" enlarges or reduces the content to the output size, e.g. for pages scanned at another size; the margins keep their size. "Factor" shows how much.
• For all pages: an own target size (width × height) and the limits "Enlarge to at most" and "Reduce to at most". It replaces "Lock for now".
• The Default Parameters window sets these for new pages and new projects.

Select Content

• "Fill factor" and "Border tolerance" for the automatic content detection, for art books and photo pages (a higher fill factor keeps photos in the content box).
• The automatic detection uses the BlurDiv threshold, so shadows at the spine are less often taken for content.

Thumbnails and page selection

• Selected pages have a blue border; only the current page is filled.
• The context menu "Select" selects pages by pattern (e.g. every second page); "Apply to ..." preselects them. All "Apply to ..." windows share the same page choice with page counts.
• Sort orders explain their order in a tooltip.

Other

• Settings: choose the accent color.
• Page split: redrawn picture buttons.
• Fix DPI of All Images: several images or size groups can be selected; a replaced image file passes on its resolution if it is plausible.
• Double-click shows the whole page again after zooming in.
• Large color JPEG or PNG scans (over 256 MB decoded) load again.
• Picture shape "Free shape" is called "Contour mask".
• Qt 6.4 or later is required (Qt 5 is no longer supported).

Fixes

• DPI changes made in the Fix DPI window were lost when the project file is in the image folder.
• Drag handles didn't react after switching windows with Alt+Tab.
• Seed fill fixes from ScanTailor Spectre (picture detection, background).

Downloads

• Windows: portable ZIP, unpack and run scantailor-ocr.exe.
• Linux: .deb package and AppImage, built automatically and untested.

ScanTailor OCR 1.0.7

What's new

One consistent layout for the options panels

• Consistent wording: Title Case for panel titles, headings and menus, sentence case for check boxes and buttons; "Folder" instead of "Directory"; labels end with a colon.
• The panels are narrower (at least 320 pixels) and laid out the same way: controls start at the left edge, options that depend on a check box are indented, and units are shown in the fields (°, px, %, dpi, mm).
• Settings that don't apply at the moment are grayed out instead of hidden, so their values stay visible. Panel titles are bold.
• The Default Parameters window is built like the options panels.

Deskew

• The detection method (content or top page edge) is set per page. "Apply to ..." applies it; in Auto mode the target pages are measured again.
• Default parameters: the deskew angle ranges from -45° to 45°.

Margins

• New panel "Source Resolution" above "Margins": the source DPI is set there, with "dpi" in the fields. The button "Fix DPI of all images ..." opens the same window as Tools > Fix DPI of All Images ... (formerly "Fix DPI ...").
• New panel "Common Size" below "Alignment": it shows the common size of the pages whose size is matched, and "Lock for now" keeps it fixed while you edit margins and content boxes.
• The button "Match size to all pages" is gone. It applied the whole alignment to all pages, not only the size, and didn't store "Match size with other pages" for the current page. Use "Apply to ..." with all pages instead.
• The nine alignment buttons are centered.

Output

• The panel "Mode" is ordered by topic: "Fill offcut", "Fill outside page box" and "Fill margins" are under "Filling" with the color, the two smoothing options (black and white only) under "Threshold".
• One check box "Equalize illumination" for the color mode in use, with "Also in picture zones" below it for mixed mode.
• The panel "Processing" is called "Content" and comes right after "Output Resolution"; its check box is called "Dark content on a light background".
• Tooltips for the fill options, the filling color, smoothing, threshold method, picture zones, despeckling and split output.
• Default Parameters: same order as in the Output step, the smoothing options follow right below the chosen threshold method, and the Output tab no longer has a horizontal scroll bar.

Status bar

• The file name shows up to 50 characters; the full name is in the tooltip.
• The image size is followed by the resolution of the image shown, e.g. "210 x 297 mm / 300 dpi", so a wrong source DPI can be seen in every step.

Fixes

• Releasing "Lock for now" updates the thumbnails.
• Changing the output resolution no longer turns off automatic dewarping on pages not yet processed.
• The filling color "Black" now also works with dewarping.

Downloads

• Windows: portable ZIP, unpack and run scantailor-ocr.exe.
• Linux: .deb package and AppImage, built automatically and untested.

ScanTailor OCR 1.0.6

What's new

PDF compression

• The panel "PDF compression" has a part for each kind of page: color and grayscale, posterized pages, and black and white.
• JPEG 2000 for color, grayscale and posterized pages: better looking pictures at the same size, or smaller files at the same quality. At quality 100 it is lossless.
• Lossless choices for every kind of page (Deflate, or no compression).
• Replacing an existing PDF is always confirmed first.

TIFF compression of the output files

• New panel "TIFF compression" at the bottom of the Output step (moved from the settings window), built like the PDF compression: color and grayscale, posterized pages (new, separate setting), and black and white.
• New: JPEG quality, and LZMA for the smallest lossless files (slow, and read by few other programs; ScanTailor OCR and its PDF export read it).
• Smaller files without a setting: grayscale and color pages use the horizontal predictor with LZW, Deflate and LZMA, and posterized pages with up to 16 colors are stored with 4 bits per pixel.
• After processing, the Output step shows the written file, so losses from JPEG are visible right away.

One layout for all options panels

• Each panel holds what its "Apply To ..." button applies; its parts have bold headings instead of nested collapsible boxes.
• Split Pages: the page type is switched with Auto / Manual buttons in the panel. The apply dialog offers "Page type" and "Split line".
• Output: resolution and dewarping are set directly in the panel.
• All apply dialogs offer the same choices of pages and have distinct titles.

Fixes

• Changing the source DPI in the Margins panel takes effect right away (before, only after switching steps).
• Thumbnails are updated again when their path is longer than 260 characters, as with pages renamed by the automatic import.

Downloads

• Windows: portable ZIP, unpack and run scantailor-ocr.exe.
• Linux: .deb package and AppImage, built automatically and untested.

ScanTailor OCR 1.0.5

What's new

Create PDF as step 7

• PDF export is now step 7 "Create PDF" in the main window instead of a separate dialog.
• Pages are shown as tiles, numbered in PDF order. Ticks and order are kept while the project is open.

Automatic import of new scans

• Step 1 is now called "Import". Its new panel "Automatic import" watches a folder, e.g. the one a scanning program saves to, and adds each new image to the project as soon as it is completely written.
• Three modes: add at the end, insert after the selected page, or replace the selected pages with the next scan (replaced images are moved to a folder "replaced").
• New projects get a project file right away and may start empty when new scans are to be imported.

Other changes

• Start page with buttons and an easier to read list of recent projects.
• Qt's own texts (standard buttons, dialogs, context menus) are translated, too.
• A deleted output folder is created again when the project is opened, instead of asking for relinking.
• Radio buttons are round at every font size (unselected ones were drawn as squares).

Downloads

• Windows: portable ZIP, unpack and run scantailor-ocr.exe.
• Linux: .deb package and AppImage, built automatically and untested.

ScanTailor OCR 1.0.0

First release of ScanTailor OCR: ScanTailor Advanced 1.2.1 plus export to compact, searchable PDF.

Highlights

• PDF export ("File → Create PDF ..."): choose and order the pages; black and white pages stored losslessly as JBIG2, mixed pages with split output in layers (text over a small JPEG picture).
• Text recognition (OCR) with Tesseract: an invisible text layer makes the PDF searchable. German and English are included; more languages can be downloaded in the program.
• Many fixes and improvements to ScanTailor Advanced 1.2.1 – see the README for the full list.

Downloads

• Windows (64-bit, portable): ScanTailor-OCR-1.0.0-win64.zip – unpack and start scantailor-ocr.exe. No installation needed.
  SHA256: 06E38E26164CF6E9B8623571503150B5D161FD1DEA779FB5CC5A630E43EB30B5
• Linux: .deb (Ubuntu/Debian) and AppImage – built automatically and untested.

Settings, profiles and OCR languages of ScanTailor Advanced (scantailor-advanced) are copied over on the first start. Projects (.ScanTailor) remain compatible.