A scan tool for Kodi
This KODI addon enables you to scan documents directly in Kodi, e.g. by using your USB flatbed scanner.
Of course, Kodi isn't this kind of software where you expect to scan documents. But for me it is convenient to scan and archive my daily mail from my sofa simply by using my remote control and without opening any desktop application.
Before I have written this addon I used the scanner buttons with same functionality by utilizing scanbd. But this doesn't work all the time for some reasons and polls the USB interface all the time in order to determine if there was an button event. See also problems that I have reported here
That's why I have written this addon which comes with the following features:
- Kodi-sane-scanner is a picture addon
- configurable devices, dimension, resolution, color mode, brightness, contrast
- scan single or multiple pages
- preview page
- convert to PDF file
- join multiple pages to single document
- add OCR text layer to PDF
- archive PDF in filesystem
- send PDF as email attachment
- print document
- view PDF documents located in archive folder (PDF files in general!)
- rename and delete PDF documents in archive folder via context menu
Here are some screenshots.
You can see the already scanned pages and the actions, i.e.
- create PDF
- create PDF and send via email to specific email address
- create PDF and print on specific printer
- remove last page
- remove all pages
Setup dialog for scanner with
- discovery and selection of scanner
- dimension
- mode, i.e. lineart, grayscale or color
- format, i.e. png or jpeg
- resolution
- brightness and contrast
Output dialog in settings with
- OCR switch
- archive folder for PDF file
- email settings
- printer settings
Before you can use this addon you must setup all the external tools that this addon utilize, i.e.:
- sane with
scanimage - setup a printer
- setup tooling for creating PDF files
- setup tooling for OCR
- setup local email services
Note: Since I am a Ubuntu user I have linked Ubuntu documentation.
The addon utilizes the scanimage command which provided by sane
Open a terminal and call the following command:
$ scanimage -L
device `net:localhost:plustek:libusb:002:015' is a Canon CanoScan LiDE25 flatbed scanner
If scanimage command can't be found or there is no scanner device listed
visit these pages in order to setup your scanner
Setting up a printer should be the easiest part. Open a terminal and check if the folloing command lists printers as expected:
$ lpstat -e
HL-2030-series
If there are no printers visit one of the following pages
Creating PDF files is still not that hard. Open a terminal and check if you are able to convert an image file to a PDF file like this:
convert image.png image.pdf
If convert is not installed follow the instructions and install it.
Probably you get a message that some priviledges are not available.
In this case you must probably edit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml
and uncomment the PDF line like this:
<!-- <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" /> -->
OCR is the hardest. If you want to use OCR you must install tesseract-ocr and ocrmypdf
I guess that I did the following:
apt install \
python3-pip python-lxml \
tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-deu \
python-pdfminer python-psycopg2 \
imagemagick parallel poppler-utils pdftk \
libtiff-tools qpdf \
unpaper python-reportlab python-pil ghostscript
pip3 install --upgrade pip ## Upgrade von pip 8.1.1 auf die aktuelle pip-Version
apt install libffi-dev
pip3 install ocrmypdf
Note: tesseract-ocr-deu is for german language.
Maybe this is outdated. For latest instructions check these sites:
Last but not least you maybe want to send you files via email.
Please check if you are able to send an email via command line like this:
mail -s "test email" youremail@email.com
If this is not the case you must setup postfix (or simular tool)
apt install mailutils postfix
Of course, you must also configure postfix to your needs. Check instructions here: