Continuing with our list of utilities for working with documents, we will see programs to scan to PDF in Ubuntu. Although in the home environment it was abandoned in favor of mobile device cameras, Scanners continue to be useful in the workplace and academia.
Unfortunately, on Linux we do not have anything like Abby FineReader, which is the best tool to automate the process of scanning, recognizing and converting documents that I was able to test. However, with a little work you can achieve good results.
Programs to scan to PDF in Ubuntu
Let's start by clarifying a couple of concepts:
A scanner is a device that allows you to transform documents or images in paper format into digital files. which makes its manipulation possible. Although, as we said, you can use the phone's camera for the same objective (There are applications that help) scanners are optimized for this task.
Most scanners run on Linux thanks to SANE, an open source project that provides the appropriate drivers and firmware in case the manufacturers do not.
Optical character recognition is a technology that converts images into editable and searchable text files.. In addition to printed text, some applications are capable of recognizing handwritten text, barcode, QR or signatures.
gscan2pdf
This It is a classic that is in the repositories of all Linux distributions. The program allows us to create multi-page documents from images scanned or saved on the computer that contain text. The result can be saved or sent by email.
In order to do optical character recognition, the program needs to install Tesseract and the Spanish language pack We do it with
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-spa
We install the program with
sudo apt install gscan2pdf
and we remove it with:
sudo apt remove gscan2pdf
document scanner
I don't know if I'm the one who insults the readers' intelligence by explaining what he does. this program or the GNOME developers when it came to giving it the title. The application works with all SANE compatible scanners to scan the document and allows you to remove parts that do not look good and rotate the image. The result can be saved to PDF or multiple image formats.
Installs with:
flatpak install flathub org.gnome.SimpleScan
No, I was not confused about the application
It is uninstalled with:
flatpak uninstall org.gnome.SimpleScan