An automatic scan server software for scanners with document feeder. It creates multi-page PDFs with selectable text (OCR) by just one button press.
- A stack of documents is processed after pressing the button on the scanner.
- Front and back of each sheet of paper is scanned and stored in a PDF file.
- OCR is employed to make the text searchable & selectable in the PDF.
- Empty pages are detected and removed during the process.
- Each resulting PDF file is named after the first date found in the document along with the first few word encountered.
- All generated PDF files and the scanned images are made easily accessible in the local network on a samba share (Windows network share).
Special command sheets allow to switch between different modes of operation:
- By default each sheet of paper is scanned to a single PDF file consisting of 2 pages maximum (single mode).
- A special command sheet allows to switch to multi mode: A single PDF is created from all sheets which follow that command sheet.
- When another command sheet is encountered, a new PDF file is created to contain the next sequence of pages.
The required command sheets (piece of paper with a QR code on it) can be generated by the following command:
./scan.sh sheets
They will be appear as PDF files on the network/samba share in a folder named
command-sheets and need to be printed on paper, preferrably black and white.
- Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500
Currently, Legenscandary was developed and tested with the Fujitsu ScanSnap.
Other devices may work too, they have to support double-sided scanning in a single pass.
For control, the respective device as to be supported by SANE on Linux.
This can be tested by running the command scanimage -L.
If the scanner is listed, chances are good that it can be supported by Legenscandary.
Please open a feature request in the issues section for each desired scanner.
Legenscandary was tested on the following platforms, others might work as well. Especially Debian or Ubuntu Linux based systems should work.
The tables below list the processing time per scanned page on average (mean) with the standard deviation (±) and the number of processed documents used to calculate this statistic from (#runs). The fastest platform is listed first.
- In multi mode, each PDF (doc1, doc2) was printed out and fed to the scanner as a whole with a multi command sheet on top, so that the outcome is again a PDF of the same content.
- In single mode, the individual sheets of the test PDFs were processed as individual documents (no command sheet), hence resulting in 2 pages per PDF (no blank pages included).
| median (secs) | mean (secs) | ± (secs) | #runs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| single sheet (2 pages) | 18 | 17 | 1 | 17 |
| multiple sheets | 156 | 158 | 9 | 6 |
| median (secs) | mean (secs) | ± (secs) | #runs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| single sheet (2 pages) | 246 | 267 | 31 | 10 |
| multiple sheets | 291 | 290 | 20 | 8 |
Compared to the Raspberry Pi 2B above, it needs approximately only 30 - 40 % of the computing time. Due to full processing load the temperature raised up to 85°C at the CPU and the GPU with passive cooling only. A small simple fan reduced it to approx. 50°C.
| median (secs) | mean (secs) | ± (secs) | #runs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| single sheet (2 pages) | 599 | 625 | 154 | 9 |
| multiple sheets | 1075 | 1076 | 18 | 6 |
- SANE
- ScanTailor
- Tesseract OCR
- Ghostscript
- many more command line tools
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/legenscandary/scan/master/install%2Bupdate.sh | bash
It needs approx 30 min on Rpi 2, depends on network speed for package updates as well
Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please open an issue. Otherwise, I am happy to get your feedback by plain old email.
Please submit patches to code or documentation as GitHub pull requests! Contributions must be licensed under the GNU GPLv3. The contributor retains the copyright.
Legenscandary is licensed under the GNU General Public License, v3. A copy of this license is included in the file LICENSE.
Copyright 2015-2024, Ingo Breßler.