[sane-devel] help with improving text scans

[gobo]

for some time now i've been using homemade scripts with scanimage and
scanadf to scan my paper documents. most of my documents are plain
text. the results have always been poor and marginally acceptable. i'm
using suse 10.3 and an hp aio j6450 or psc1210xi.

recently i obtained a canon scanner w/adf for use at work where i must
use windows. to get around the image compatibility issues of microsoft
document imaging (office 2003) i simply print the scanned image to pdf
with acrobat. the results obtained with mdi are far superior to
anything i've ever been able to achieve with sane apps.

i've spent hours fumbling around with scanimage options, imagemagick
convert to resize the images and ps2pdf to produce the pdf files.
while i have made some slight improvements over the default settings,
i've never been able to get even close to the mdi output. in the few
places where i must have a good scan, i use resolutions of 150 or 300,
but to get prints of the image becomes a real pain. i must load the
image in gimp, fiddle around resizing it and then printing.


my standard scanimage script would contain:
scanimage -x 215.9 -y 297 -d
hpaio:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.1.103 \
-pv --mode gray > $FILE


pieces from a perl script using the adf:
# this is the scan device
@scanr = ("hpaio:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.1.103");
# these are the command line options for scanadf
@opts = ("-x 215.9 -y 297 -v --mode=gray --source ADF --batch-scan=no -e 1");

# scan page
system("scanadf @opts -d @scanr -o $fnamepg");

adding --resolution=150, or 300 does produce a larger image, with less
artifacting, and much more readable, but difficult to print.

the answer must be one of two things -- either i'm missing something
real simple about producing hi-res 8.5x11" images (that is right in
front of my nose) or we are just not there yet with linux scanning.

can someone correct, or put me on a better path?

thanks.