Scanner Applications for Fedora

The use of a scanner provides a wealth of options to enhance productivity. You can manipulate scanned images in graphics applications such as The GIMP, Draw, and Kontour and then print, fax, or embed them in a word processing document. You can scan paper documents for archival purposes, or you can process them with optical character recognition (OCR) software to translate images into words that can be edited in a text editor or word processor. Fedora Core provides the Xsane and Kooka applications to assist you with scanning.

Scanner support is provided by Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE). If your scanner is supported, it is listed on the SANE support page at http://www.sane-project.org/.

NOTE

The development version of SANE supports scanners that are not supported in the regular version. If your scanner is supported only in the development version, you need to download and compile the CVS version of SANE. That is a complex operation suitable for advanced Linux users only, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter. For information on that process, see the CVS-RCS HOWTO Document for Linu (Source Code Control System) at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/_CVS-RCS-HOWTO.html.

The VueScan Scanner Application

If your scanner does not support SANE, you might consider the excellent VueScan scanner application. VueScan, available from http://www.hamrick.com/, supports more scanners than SANE. It is designed for photography professionals but is easy to use. A full list of VueScan's supported scanners can be found at http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#supported.

You can download VueScan for evaluation. The program is unrestricted but places a watermark on any scan until you purchase a serial number (current cost: U.S. $60; U.S. $80 for upgrades past 12 months). The site offers some of the best documentation and support concerning scanner usage we have seen.

VueScan provides features in addition to scanning commands that allow you to crop, rotate, and color correct images. A detailed tutorial on using VueScan can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/onelucent/VS/vsm.html.

The Xsane application, as shown in Figure 9.9, is a graphical front end to SANE. It allows you to acquire and manipulate scanned images. It can be run as a plug-in from The GIMP. (The GIMP is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10.)

Figure 9.9. Upon starting, Xsane presents several related screens on your desktop: a control interface, a histogram, a preview screen, and an options dialog.

Kooka is a KDE application that provides similar functionality to Xsane, but it provides OCR capabilities as well as an image gallery function. Because Kooka is a KDE application, it can provide scanning services to other KDE applications (such as KOffice and KView) if they are written to use it. Kooka uses gocr (http://jocr.sourceforge.net/) as an application for character recognition, but support for Clara OCR (http://www.claraocr.org/) is planned for the future.

The configuration of scanner devices is covered in detail in Chapter 10.