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Accepted
Luis Alvarado
Asked: 2012-02-23 16:33:12 +0800 CST

Scanning from terminal

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I want to be able to scan from the terminal and then send the scanned output to a specific directory. Can this be done from the terminal.

command-line scanning 11.10

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    scanimage is installed by default.

    And here's me using it:

    $ scanimage -L
device `epson2:libusb:002:003' is a Epson PID 084F flatbed scanner

$ scanimage -d "epson2:libusb:002:003" --format tiff > rawr.tiff

    Obviously that generates a tiff-formatted file. Lossless but usually quite vast. You can convert this down withou an intermediary file by installing imagemagick and then piping the scan output into the convert command:

    $ scanimage -d "epson2:libusb:002:003" --format=tiff | convert tiff:- scan.jpg
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  2. Tested in 18.04 LTS, works fine.

    You may need to set a scan resolution (150/300/600 dpi). To do this use "--resolution" param (this param don't mentioned in scanimage manpage docs). It helps you to reduce the size of produced files.

    Example for 600 dpi scan with png output:

    scanimage "epson2:libusb:002:003" --resolution 600 --format=png

    Output file size difference between 300 and 600 dpi is significant if you scan an image (not text).

    My values for default A4 image:

    • 300 dpi: 2560px * 3150px image, 2-20 Mb *.png file
    • 600 dpi: 5120px * 7020px image, 30-65 Mb *.png file
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