Hello,
I need to digitalize a lot of documents at the moment. Therefor I am scanning those and save them as pdf-files. I tried several programs but I did not find any that is fully satisfying. I’ll share my experiences and ask for feedback on how best working on this and on the things, I did not fully understand.
My setup:
Manjaro Linux with Cinnamon desktop
Scanner: Canon Pixma MX925 Printer/Scanner: Having an ADF with double sided scan possible.
Driver package canon-pixma-mx920-complete via AUR installed.
Simple-scan: When using the ADF the scan is not centered. I always need to set the scan frame for the first page manually. All in all I get good results scaning in “Text” mode with a white background and the documents are readable in good quality. Files are very small (150dpi, ~28k per page).
Is there a way to save a kind of preset scan frame e.g. in a config file or so?
Saving the file always produces an error message “Cild-process coul not run (no such file or directory)”. The file gets saved anyway. So why the error?
Despite simple-scan all other programs will have a non-white page background when scanning with grey scale. And files are significantly bigger. But scanning in sketch-mode (b/w) makes text nearly unreadable or of very poor quality. I did not find out how simple-scan is post-processing the files to get those good results. I played around in other programs to find setting producing comparable results without success.
Skanlite:
Application reacts with some delay on user interaction. But generally it is working.
Scans in greyscale mode do not have white background. - in scet-mode with different thresholds no satisfying result and still quite big files.
Skanpage:
Also huge delay and saving does not work at all.
XSane:
Works well, but same issue having greyscale with not white bg or sketch mode with poor quality.
gscan2pdf:
Here I can set a whitepoint and then the background is nearly white. but behind text areas it remains grey.
So how whould you propose to efficiently digitalize documents? Which settings and workflows would you recommend?