For those interested, I made this command line interface for scanning PDFs with SANE scanimage (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE) and adding OCR optical character recognition ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software) ). It has a feature for automatically dimensioning the image to the appropriate size, or default to letter paper.
https://github.com/tzcrawford/dotfiles/blob/main/scripts/in_terminal/scan-wizard.sh Zack On 25/11/04 09:29PM, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote: > Hi all, > > Where: GoLUG Online: https://meet.jit.si/golug > When: Wednesday, 11/5/2025 7pm sharp Eastern STANDARD time > Arrive 15 minutes early for Microphone check & discussion > Who: Steve Litt, Troubleshooter, Developer, Tech Writer > What: Linux and Scanners > > Getting scanners to work with Linux has never been easy, even for those > scanners promising Linux compatibility (Brother, for instance). Too > many moving parts, too little community knowledge, and the knowledge > there is is often out of date and contradictory. Everything's too > black-boxy. So for years I operated the scanner in my Brother > MFC-L5850DW multifunction by scanning to a thumb drive and > sneakernetting to my computer. A productivity catastrophe. > > An email on the Orange County (CA) LUG mailing list reminded me of this > problem, and I said "hey, this is 2025, and I have ChatGPT now". So in > 45 minutes, by asking ChatGPT the right questions, I was operating my > scanner, from Void Linux. Void then worked with my exact scanner, in > the exact right way. Ancient problem solved. > > Void Linux doesn't accept RPM or DEB packages without a lot of > fooling around, so I had to construct everything the right way. Another > three hours and I understood the mechanics behind Linux scanning. The > following is the world's tersest summary: > > user<->xsane<->libsane<->brscan5_driver<->scanner > > Note: The brscan5_driver could be pretty much any driver for a > particular model of scanner, regardless of brand, as long as that > driver can interface with libsane (the SANE API). > > At the presentation I'll showcase everything necessary to interface a > Brother MFC-L5850DW scanner with Void Linux, while at the same time > making it relevant for any scanner and any distro. > > Hope to see you there. > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > GoLUG Publicity Coordinator > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list: [email protected] > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
