DIY Book Scanner

Hello All,

I have recently put together a document describing my linux bookscanning workflow. I have some general scanning tips for using different types of scanners (flatbed, formfeed, portable), and also more specific instructions for using them with a Linux based system. I have made a camera based scaner, which I will post about on this forum in a bit, but I haven't written anything up about it. I also talk about how to use a poorly scanned PDF as the source, extract it to pages and post process them. I cover the basics of using ScanTailor to post process. Finally, I explain how to create small PDF and DJVU files with OCR, and chapter indexing. I have links and names for all neccessary software, all of which have been tested and confirmed to list on Linux, and explain invocation for all commands. I don't cover the use of my smoothscan tool, as smoothscan is still a very young piece of software, and not quite ready for production use. I hope it will be useful to people new to book scanning, new to Linux, or new to Linux book scanning.

You can read the guide here:
https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-gu ... nning.html

I'm sorry for not just posting the entire guide on here, but I am going to do many updates, and it would be difficult to keep the forum post and the site page in sync, so I will just focus on my page.

Nice work and thanks ncraun!

Thanks Nate, this is very helpful!

I had similar needs but for a different audience so I ended up also writing a guide to book scanning using free software. In the interests of avoiding us all doing this many times, I put everything up on github: https://github.com/wikey/bookscan

Patches are most certainly welcome and, if there is interest, we can move the whole thing to a github organization so multiple people can have write access.