Scanning

I scan all the paper documents I receive and file them digitally. This lets me get at them from anywhere, which in turn makes searching for a particular bit of info easier, especially when OCR is applied.

This page holds my notes on getting things going, in case I have to reinstall.

The EPSON SX400 is one of those All-in-one printer/scanners that lets you photocopy and print direct from memory cards (e.g. camera). Ubuntu 9.04 seems to support printing on it out-of-the-box, but not scanning.

I contacted EPSON through their UK website's “chat now” feature and was given this helpful link: http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do

I was able to install the Debian 64-bit package without any problems, but it didn't seem to have any effect until I rebooted. I suspect all that I really had to do was refresh the udev file-system, but I couldn't be bothered to work out how to do that. Rebooting got things going: XSANE et al were able to detect the SX400 as a scanner and away I went!

2010-09-12: It would seem that the device file (i.e. /dev/bus/usb/005/002) was not readable by my user account.

The current favourite seems to be tesseract. It only works well when the image you feed it is bitonal (e.g. black and white, _not_ greyscale), and it doesn't cope with page-layout. So ideally you'd touch-up your image to remove all decoration and relay the page out so that all text is linear, but who can be bothered?

Ubuntu 9.04 offers tesseract through its default packages: sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-eng (which will pull in tesseract-ocr)

… in progress …