Scanning and OCR on Arch Linux

bike9876@エボ猫.コム

This describes setting up scanning from a generic scanner (connected to my local network) to my Arch Linux system. It also describes OCR both while scanning and also on existing pdfs.

Install packages

Install sane:

sudo pacman -S sane

scanimage (see below) suits me fine for most scanning, but you might want to also install:

• simple-scan (sudo pacman -S simple-scan)
• (more advanced) xsane (yay -S xsane - see https://github.com/Jguer/yay#user-content-installation on how to install yay)

And for scanning with OCR:

sudo pacman -S tesseract tesseract-data-eng

(if a language other than English is required, run

sudo pacman -S tesseract tesseract-data

and select the tesseract-data package(s) to install)

A graphical program for scanning with OCR:

sudo pacman -S gscan2pdf

For OCR of pdfs on the command line:

yay -S ocrmypdf

Check if scanner supports AirScan: enter scanner details in https://mfi.apple.com/account/airprint-search.

If supported, install sane-airscan:

sudo pacman -S sane-airscan

Check for connected scanners

Run

scanimage -L

I have an HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 connected to the network (and which supports AirScan), and get output:

device `escl:https://192.168.X.Y:443' is a HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811] platen,adf scanner
device `hpaio:/net/officejet_pro_6960?ip=192.168.X.Y&queue=false' is a Hewlett-Packard officejet_pro_6960 all-in-one
device `airscan:e0:HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811]' is a eSCL HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811] ip=192.168.X.Y

(ip address have been redacted)

Notes:

• I only get the device `hpaio: ... line if the hplip package has been installed (which is needed for printing to work).
• I actually get a load of “garbage” at the start of the output of scanimage:

O0W
   Hs<M´M
        q.[lNJ+"ߏ}sszr}?[<|:B{3v=ɇsi"1vƦ?X9oI
                                             2?ȋ ])^uFF{ԞN75)#|
...

which is in fact the output from the printer when accessed via its web interface (gzipped). I don’t know why this is appearing or how to suppress it.

Scanning

With scanimage

I always want the airscan device to be used. For my HP OfficeJet Pro 6960, I have found that:

• the escl device does not work correctly for multiple pages fed from the ADF (only the first page is captured).
• the hpaio device does not work at all.

Setting the environment variable SANE_DEFAULT_DEVICE sets the default device scanimage will use. So for my HP6960 I have

export SANE_DEFAULT_DEVICE='airscan:e0:HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811]'

(I set this in ~/local/profile.d/210sane, which is read in and executed by my ~/.bash_profile - see my notes on Bash configuration .)

For a single page on the scanner

Scan to file page.png with

scanimage --resolution=300 -o page.png

Change the output file suffix to .tif (or .tiff), .jpg (or .jpeg), .pdf, or .pnm ¹ to save as a tiff file etc. (Can also specify the output format with --format=tiff etc.) The supported resolutions can be seen by running scanimage -h . If I’m scanning a page smaller than A4, I specify -x and -y args (see table at bottom).

If I need to apply an additional rotation I use something like:

scanimage --resolution=300 --format=png | magick - -rotate 90 page.png

(the imagemagick package is needed) or

scanimage --resolution=300 --format=jpeg | magick - -rotate 90 page.jpg

etc EXCEPT if the desired output is a pdf, in which case use ²

scanimage --resolution=300 --format=jpeg | magick - -rotate 90 page.pdf

Can also scan to a pdf with OCR (so there is a “text layer” as well as the scanned image in the pdf - so the document can be searched and text can be selected from the document):

scanimage --resolution=300 --format=jpeg | tesseract - foo -l eng pdf

which saves to foo.pdf. Allow for multiple languages (apart from just English) with eg -l eng+fr (need to install the relevant tesseract-data-<lang> packages).

Consider changing the tesseract thresholding method if not all the page text is successfully processed. See the output of

tesseract --print-parameters | grep thresholding_

for options, so eg

scanimage --resolution=300 --format=jpeg | tesseract - foo -l eng -c thresholding_method=2 pdf

for Sauvola thresholding.

(Ways to see how much of the text has been processed include:

• Run pdftotext (in the poppler package on Arch Linux) on the pdf: eg pdftext file.pdf file.txt. Compare file.txt with the pdf file.
• Open the processed pdf with a pdf viewer and try to select all the text.
• Open the pdf with gscan2pdf (see below for gscan2pdf): gscan2pdf file.pdf and view the “Text layer”. )

For multiple pages from the automatic document feeder (ADF)

(The scanner has to support an ADF - see the output of scanimage -h for the --source option.)

scanimage --batch --resolution=300 --source=ADF --format=png

The scan pages are saved as out1.png, out2.png etc.,

If there are more than 9 pages, then better to specify an additional argument --batch=out%02d.png (for example), so the pages will be saved as out01.png, …, out09.png, out10.png, … (and so will sort nicely).

Change --format=... to output files in a different format. If specify --format=pdf then the scan pages are saved as a single multi-page file out1.pdf.

If I’m scanning a page smaller than A4, I specify -l, -x and -y args (see table at bottom).

As for the single page example above, can also scan to a pdf with OCR:

scanimage --resolution=300 --batch --batch-print --source=ADF --format=jpeg | tesseract - foo -l eng -c stream_filelist=true pdf

which saves to foo.pdf. Note that it leaves files out1.jpg, out2.jpg, … (one file for each page) that probably should then be deleted.

With gscan2pdf

gscan2pdf is an easy to use graphical program to scan pages and apply OCR (it is a graphical layer over scanimage and tesseract). See https://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/.

The only gotcha I found is knowing which scanning device to use (if there is more than 1 device found).

The options listed by gscan2pdf correspond to the “description” part of the output of scanimage -L.

More precisely, the options listed have the form <vendor> <model>. To get the mapping from device name to <vendor> <model>, use

scanimage -f $'%d: %v %m\n'

which outputs for my HP6960 printer scanner:

escl:https://192.168.1.47:443: HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811]
hpaio:/net/officejet_pro_6960?ip=192.168.1.47&queue=false: Hewlett-Packard officejet_pro_6960
airscan:e0:HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811]: eSCL HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811]

So if I want the airscan device, I choose eSCL HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 [E3C811] as my scanner for gscan2pdf.

OCR of existing pdfs

ocrmypdf does a good job of adding an OCR text layer to existing scanned pdfs (see https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF).

Typical usage is:

ocrmypdf -l eng --deskew --jobs 4 input.pdf output.pdf

-l eng means scan in English, can have eg -l eng+fr if the relevant tesseract data files are installed. --jobs 4 means use up to 4 cpu cores simultaneously.

As for above, consider changing the tesseract thresholding method (eg --tesseract-thresholding=sauvola) if not all the page text is successfully processed.

Table of arguments to scanimage for smaller scan sizes

The HP6960 has a scan size of 215.9mm x 300.567mm (from output of scanimage -h).

Run scanimage -l <l> -x <x> -y <y> for paper sizes smaller than A4, where <l>, <x> and <y> are given by the following table. (The values depend on whether the page is being scanned on the flatbed, or via the ADF. ³ - blank entries mean I never scan by that method.)