Q: creating good-quality PDFs from scans?

[Joel Oliver]

Eric wrote:
> D. R. Evans wrote:
>   
>> I am in the process of migrating one of my few remaining activities from
>> Windows to Kubuntu: scanning and filing documents.
>>
>> I have never tried to perform this kind of opertaion under Linux before,
>> and I'm having a problem with the quality of the final stored files.
>>
>> I got kooka working fine, and the image files that it creates at a 300dpi
>> scan look really good. BUT I can't figure out how to generate high-quality
>> PDFs from them.
>>
>> I have tried printing to the PDF print-to-file printer installed by
>> Kubuntu, but the quality of the output frankly sucks. Instead of crisp,
>> clear characters (which is what appears on the image produced by kooka),
>> it's like I'm looking at a low-quality JPG with artifacts around the
>> characters.
>>
>> I've tried messing with all kinds of settings, but nothing seems to make
>> any difference at all.
>>
>> Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get PDFs that are of a
>> similar quality to the original images?
>>
>>   Doc
>>     
>
>
> I've never had that problem. Maybe you might want to look at Xsane if 
> your can't figure out what is going wrong when you use Kooka.
>
> Eric Jackson
>
>   
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>>     
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>   
I have the perfect solution (I hope)....  Look into the gscan2pdf 
package.  This quickly allows you to scan large amounts of paper right 
into high quality pdf's!  The unpaper package removes ugly paper borders 
and gocr adds character recognition... so a simple:

sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf unpaper xdg-utils gocr sane

should add it in with all options you may need to try it out.  Hope it 
works for you.
Joel.