[SOLVED] Difficulty getting scanner to work with Debian
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Gimp is great at printing. I tend to a2ps my documents and print them in gimp. It allows me to convert them to B&W and other things to keep ink replacements fewer and farther between. For maps I can use a big brush and erase the parts of the map I don't care about to save ink. It's slower to convert them and edit them before printing, but nice to have that granular control in a familiar and trusted results sort of way.
The problem I'm having with xsane is getting files scanned and then transferred so that they don't take up an inordinate amount of space. I had to scan a two page document today that I emailed to someone. That two page scan took up so much space that it defaulted to Google Drive...it was in excess of 25mg for the two pages! That shouldn't be. I just wanted to forward two pages as a pdf file. What is the simplest way to scan and then forward? Maybe Simple Skan is better for this purpose?
I just tried to send a file again with a reduced size. Still I received the following message: "The response from the remote server was: 550 5.7.0 Message Size Violation" It will not send the message via email because the scanned material bloats the server apparently. What is the best way to use this device to make it work on a Linux format? My previous desk top computer was a Mac-mini and it just used the basic software of the scanner itself. There was never a problem. I'm sure this isn't hard; it's just a matter of knowing how to set it up and then properly save the material. Thanks!
You can convert to jpg and save a lot of space. A lot of email servers cap attachments at 10MB in size per email. For me, I would probably a2ps and ps2pdf if I really wanted pdf documents. You could probably open the images in libreoffice and export as PDF too. And yes, IMAGES are documents (of sorts). For that matter you could probably scan in libreoffice as well. I tend to not have libreoffice installed since that thing updates a lot and is huge. There's also a number of OCR tools if you'd rather have the text contents that you could cut and paste to an email body.
But this is just a text file...no images. I like to use pdf for text files since anyone can open them, regardless of the OS they're using. Most of what I transfer via email are text files...very seldom photos or images. What are the best settings to use in xsane for sending text files? If all you're doing is emailing (not printing) you could probably use a lower setting than 600.
I've found that scanning to pdf does seem to result in relatively large file sizes, but one workaround I've employed is to open the pdf document and then print to file. This results in a pdf of a more reasonable size (and quality is still ok). I know applications such as the gimp can also be used to compress (with loss) files as desired, but the workaround is sufficient for my purposes.
There are OCR aka optical character recognition tools in linux. Which would convert the IMAGE back in to TEXT. Although like most browser fonts it gets 1, l, I, !, |, (, ), [, ], etc mixed up a lot. Otherwise compression is your friend.
So...this is getting a bit confusing...is it better to scan a document and save as jpeg rather than pdf? OR, is the idea to save initially as PDF and then convert that file to jpeg? Could the intermediary step be skipped and just save directly as jpeg? I have no hard and fast commitment to pdf except that it opens easily no matter what the OS. But if jpeg is equally accessible I'm delighted to use it.
I've never used OCR tools but I'm gathering from what you say that they are for compression. My sense is there is a learning curve there.
What I'm trying to say is that a PDF generated from a TEXT source is smaller than one generated from an IMAGE source. And there's always a learning curve. And dozens of ways to do basically the same thing.
Part of my initial recommendation for gimp is that you can convert it to a smaller color space (B&W) and then export as a .jpg for a small file size. As well as other file types. Lots of roads to rome, as someone somewhere probably said. And a few less digital routes as well, via snail mail, if email is failing you.
I've never used OCR tools but I'm gathering from what you say that they are for compression. My sense is there is a learning curve there.
OCR is not about compression, but the act of processing graphical data (representing text) with intelligent character recognition and generating a text file from it is obviously going to result in a substantially smaller file.
I appreciate all these very helpful comments and useful references. Most often what I scan are business related documents that need to be signed and forwarded back to the sender. (When this cannot be accomplished electronically via Docusign.) I print out the sent document(s), sign them, and then scan them back into the computer to be forwarded to the sender. Just very basic things of that nature. Since this does not require anything fancy by way of imaging or color, what would be the simplest way to accomplish this task? Very often snail mail is not an option as the documents must be immediately returned. That "road to Rome" often is not an option! Again, I appreciate these very helpful replies!
Experiment until you're satisfied you have the optimal resolution for the task at hand. If you don't need colour (likely the case for legal documents), select B/W and then observe PDF sizes generated.
xsane has the options color, gray, and lineart. Does "gray" signify black and white? I thought it was strange there wasn't an obvious black and white option.
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