[sane-devel] problems with scanimage to pdf

[ken]

On 02/04/2015 04:17 AM, Carsten Jensen wrote:
> On 02/03/2015 10:58 PM, m. allan noah wrote:
>> Most scanners produce big-endian data, which scanimage writes out to
>> disk when it creates the tiff. Any host-side tools that you use on the
>> tiffs will probably convert them to little-endian, since that is the
>> format of your CPU. If you attempt to rotate all of them (some of them
>> by 360 degrees), such that they all become little endian, and all get
>> the strip 204 error fixed, does the pdf work better?
>>
>> allan
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:43 PM, ken <gebser at mousecar.com> wrote:
>>> On 02/03/2015 03:21 PM, Carsten Jensen wrote:
>
> If the above doesn't work you could -as a test- make all the tiffs into
> pdf before manipulating them.
>
> Basically you'll need to find where the error occurs.
>
> I hardly doubt this is a bug from sane.
> but upgrading your imagemagick might do some good.
>
> Carsten
>

Thanks to all for the suggestions.  I've been trying and testing all 
kinds of different things for a bit over two full days, much longer than 
something like this should take.  Last night I tried hp-scan, the 
utility that came from HP with their RPM package.  It produced a really 
nice pdf on the first attempt... except, as mentioned a few days ago, 
the backside of every physical page (sheet of paper) was upside-down. 
This morning I figured out how to rectify that with pdftk.  So now I'm 
getting the pdf document I was after in the first place.  I have to say 
that the end-product is great-- so clean and clear (MUCH better than I 
was getting with SANE) at 300dpi that I'm going to try 200dpi.  Then I 
can script it, knowing that all the commands actually work as advertised.

I've been a FOSS junkie since '92 and would have preferred staying with 
it (as much as is possible under the circumstances).  But at some point 
I have to get back to the rest of my life.  At least pdftk is open 
source.  And I'll probably use SANE in future for some less demanding 
projects.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.