Quite often I’ve got to scan documents and save them as PDF. Usually I do this with gscan2pdf but for just one page even such a great tool like gscan2pdf is too much. It takes more time to start the program, go through the menus etc. than the scan process itself.

As a simple work around I wrote scan2pdf. scan2pdf is a simple and small programm for the shell. It searches for a scanner, saves the settings to a config file, scans and saves the result into a PDF on your desktop.

If you’re insterested you can download and install it via

$ sudo wget http://www.christoph-langner.de/static/scan2pdf-1.0.sh -O /usr/local/sbin/scan2pdf
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/scan2pdf

onto your system. scan2pdf uses .tif as a temporary format. To convert the image into pdf you need libtiff-tools as additionally package which is not installed inside Ubuntu by default. You’ve got to install it via.

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff-tools

Everything else which scan2pdf needs should be by default on your system. After this you can start scan2pdf via e.g.

$ scan2pdf -m gray -r 150

This will scan your document as greyscale image with a resolution of 150 dpi. The resulting file will be saved onto your desktop. I didn’t implement a way to define the name of the image since usually i change the name afterwards any way… The options of scan2pdf are

$ scan2pdf --help
Usage: scan2pdf -m {lineart,gray,color} -r [resolution in dpi]
 -m: Scan mode, choose lineart, gray or color
 -r: Resolution in dpi

When you call the program for the first time you will get a small dialog where you can choose which scanner you like to use. This info (together with some settings) will be saved into ~/.scan2pdf. When you scan several pages in a row they will be saved as scan1.pdf, scan2.pdf, etc on your desktop.

scan2pdf will be more interesting when you’ve got a scanner with “action buttons”. You can use them under linux and call with them scan2pdf…

To use these buttons you need a small daemon called scanbuttond which you can installed out of the package sources of Ubuntu or Debian. There’s also a list of supported devices on the homepage of scanbuttond. After you installed the program

$ sudo apt-get install scanbuttond 

you can test it via

$ scanbuttond -f
button 1 has been pressed on plustek:libusb:001:004
button 1 has been pressed on plustek:libusb:001:004

When you push the buttons of your scanner you should get a result like the one above. After this you should configure scanbuttond. You can do this inside the file /etc/scanbuttond/buttonpressed.sh. I replaced the “demo” line

[...]
echo "button 1 has been pressed on $2"
[...]

with

[...]
/usr/local/sbin/scan2pdf -m gray -r 150
[...]

so that scan2pdf is executed when i push the button on my scanner. I set scan2pdf to scan in greyscale and 150 dpi. Please choose your own settings. There’s not much left, than to start scanbuttond with

$ scanbuttond

I think that you don’t like to do this every time you start your computer, so you should add an entry inside “System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications” for scanbuttond…

• Name: scanbuttond
• Command: scanbuttond
• Comment: Start scanbuttond

Your done. After you start your computer scanbuttond is up and running. When you hit the button on your scanner you will get a PDF on your desktop.