Here’s another quick post about a command line tool I was delighted by.

Last night, I needed to scan some documents for some bureaucratic reasons. I’d never used a scanner on Linux before and I was worried it would take hours to figure out. I started by using gscan2pdf and had trouble figuring out the user interface – I wanted to scan both sides of the page at the same time (which I knew our scanner supported) but couldn’t get it to work.

enter scanimage!

scanimage is a command line tool, in the sane-utils Debian package. I think all Linux scanning tools use the sane libraries (“scanner access now easy”) so my guess is that it has similar abilities to any other scanning software. I didn’t need OCR in this case so we’re not going to talk about OCR.

get your scanner’s name with scanimage -L

scanimage -L lists all scanning devices you have.

At first I couldn’t get this to work and I was a bit frustrated but it turned out that I’d connected the scanner to my computer, but not plugged it into the wall. Oops.

Once everything was plugged in it worked right away. Apparently our scanner is called fujitsu:ScanSnap S1500:2314. Hooray!

list options for your scanner with --help

Apparently each scanner has different options (makes sense!) so I ran this command to get the options for my scanner:

scanimage --help -d 'fujitsu:ScanSnap S1500:2314' 

I found out that my scanner supported a --source option (which I could use to enable duplex scanning) and a --resolution option (which I changed to 150 to decrease the file sizes and make scanning faster).

scanimage doesn’t output PDFs (but you can write a tiny script)

The only downside was – I wanted a PDF of my scanned document, and scanimage doesn’t seem to support PDF output.

So I wrote this 5-line shell script to scan a bunch of PNGs into a temp directory and convert the resulting PNGs to a PDF.

#!/bin/bash
set -e

DIR=`mktemp -d`
CUR=$PWD
cd $DIR
scanimage -b --format png  -d 'fujitsu:ScanSnap S1500:2314' --source 'ADF Front' --resolution 150
convert *.png $CUR/$1

I ran the script like this. scan-single-sided output-file-to-save.pdf

You’ll probably need a different -d and --source for your scanner.

it was so easy!

I always expect using printers/scanners on Linux to be a nightmare and I was really surprised how scanimage Just Worked – I could just run my script with scan-single-sided receipts.pdf and it would scan a document and save it to receipts.pdf!.