Scan many pages straight into a PDF
Is there some easy to use program in Ubuntu that can scan many pages straight into a PDF file?
Solution 1:
The idea of having a simple scan utility was behind the development of, well, Simple Scan - the scanning tool installed by default from 10.04 on (Applications ‣ Graphics ‣ Simple Scan).
Simply scan as many pages as you want and choose PDF as file format when saving.
Another slightly less simple program that offers additional features like text recognition is gscan2pdf, also in the repositories.
Solution 2:
"Easy to use" is in the eye of the user, but xsane provides this functionality. Choose multipage where it says viewer (or hit CTRL-M), and it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out from there.
Solution 3:
I was using xsane until I saw this question and considered its interface idiosyncratic to say the least, but effective.
Upon seeing this question I went looking and found gscan2pdf living in the Ubuntu Lucid/Maverick repositories. It uses the same scanning (libsane) engine but the UI is far more Gnome-ish. For a good time, try:
sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf
Solution 4:
Change the file name from myfile.jpg to myfile.pdf on the save dialog of Simple Scan.
Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, Simple Scan 3.12.1.
This works even though the file type drop-down does not show "PDF", only "Images". I consider this an UI bug.
This feature is documented on Help > Contents:
From the "Save As" dialog box, choose one of the supported file types, or simply change the extension in the "Name" field.
It says that the following formats are supported:
- JPEG
- PNG
- TIFF
Interesting fact: if you change the scan type (dropdown besides "Scan") to "Text", the default file type becomes PDF.