Great Scanning Tools

Since I have my scanner I’ve
been scanning all the documents I have laying around to clean it up and
to faster search if I need something. There are a few tools I always
use:

Xsane

This first program is default installed in Ubuntu. Xsane uses the SANE-library

XSane is designed for acquiring images with scanners
(there are other devices like cameras and videodevices supported by
SANE, but XSane is not designed for that purpose). You can scan to
file, do a photocopy, create a fax, create and send a mail and start
XSane from the GIMP as gimp plug in.

This program is good for overall scanning of documents, it supports OCR with gocr.

You can find more about Xsane here

gscan2pdf

This program is good for scanning through ADF and with its OCR support of gocr and tesseract. It lets yu save everything

Scanning is handled with SANE via scanimage. PDF
conversion is done by PDF::API2. TIFF export is handled by libtiff
(faster and smaller memory footprint for multipage files).

To use it in ubuntu you need to add these sources (In the <release> but your version):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jeffreyratcliffe/ubuntu <release> main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jeffreyratcliffe/ubuntu <release> main

to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Now fetch the correct gpg-keys:

sudo gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 4DD7CC93
sudo gpg --export --armor 4DD7CC93 | sudo apt-key add -

After that update your sources and install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf

Note: for debian you can find the package in sid.

You can find more about gscan2pdf here

If you have any points on new program’s or on these ones, please let me know.