Pither.com

I'm a little late with this entry as Edward was Christened just over a month ago now! However I did want to say that we did all survive, even Liz managed not to have a heart attack from the stress!

It was actually a lovely day, for the weather, the service and to see so much family and a few friends (sadly we didn't have space for too many) join us to celebrate Edward.

Thank you very much to Liz's parents for hosting and to Liz's Mum for preparing much of the food.

Just for the record here we are in our posh frocks...

Xsane does do this, but it's an awful lot of clicks, even between pages and that's after you've got to the right screen and before you eventually output the file.

So here's a simple bash script to the rescue...

#!/bin/bash

export DEVICE="device, use 'scanimage -L' to see list"

echo Pages: $1
echo Filename: $2

FILENAME_BASE="/tmp/$2"

for (( i = 1; $i <= $1; i++ )); do
        echo Press ENTER to scan page $i
        read
        export FILENAME="$FILENAME_BASE.page.$i"
        scanimage -d "$DEVICE" > "$FILENAME.pnm"
        pnmtops --width=8.27 --height=11.69 "$FILENAME.pnm" > "$FILENAME.ps"
        FILELIST[$i - 1]="$FILENAME.ps"
done

gs -sDEVICE=pswrite "-sOutputFile=$FILENAME_BASE.ps" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH "${FILELIST[@]}"
ps2pdf "$FILENAME_BASE.ps" "$2.pdf"

for f in "${FILELIST[@]}"; do
        rm "$f"
done
rm "$FILENAME_BASE.ps"

Just give it the number of pages to scan and the output file name to use (without .pdf). It will prompt you for each page to be ready (I don't have a document feeder), scan them, combine them and convert it all to a PDF.

It does have a number of dependency utilities, but I already had them all installed and this was only a quick hack so I've not made a list.

Having failed to find the option in the GIMP to create colour mapped PNG files, I have just had to discover a couple of handy commands...

pngnq - tool for optimizing PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images pngcrush - optimizes PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files

The first of these takes a RGB PNG and gives back a colour mapped (by default, 256 colours) image.

The second takes those images (or RGB format ones too) and crushes them by about 20% (on the images I have been using today).

So the 22k file that GIMP created is now about 9k!