Dorian Gravier

Just another boring, autodidact, climber, biker, time traveler, and french dude.

1 minute read

This technique may be used for special occasion but I do not recommend to do it for scanning an entire book.

The process is simple and usually this can be done quickly with a Smartphone and dedicated apps. However to keep the quality and to gain in speed I decided to scan a book via a mirror reflex (Camera), crop them and reduce the quality of the picture in batch and convert them in 1 pdf.

I would use then for this:

  • Irfanview or ImageMagick for rotation if needed
  • Irfanview for the croping and resizing
  • Gow
  • ImageMagick for the convertion in pdf,

Steps:

  • Rotation using ImageMagick
    • shell mogrify -rotate "-90" *.jpg
  • Crop and resize with Irfanview. It is done in batch, meaning that the position your book in your picture should stay the same throughout the all process.
    • Open Irfanview
    • Open a picture and select what you wanna crop
    • Press B or menu File/Batch Conversion rename …
    • Select Conversion, select your output format (jpg)
    • Use Advanced options and define then: Click on Advanced
      • Select crop (click on “get current selection”)
      • Select resize, set a new size in percentage (up to you, you have to try)
    • Select your files
    • Select your output folder (other folder that input)
    • Start Batch
  • Convert in pdf with ImageMagick
    • Open a command prompt in the folder where your crop and resized pictures are
    • Run shell for /F "usebackq delims=" %A in (ls ^|grep -s jpg ^| tr “\n” “ “) do convert -quality 85 %A output.pdf
      • ls ^|grep -s jpg ^| tr "\n" " " will get the file of the jpg and put them in 1 line
      • the rest will convert it, I need to use a loop because windows is not as flexible as linux to pass the output of a cmd as parameter for another one.

Source:

  • Info on Gow and other linux tools : [https://tinyapps.org/blog/201606040700_tiny_unix_tools_windows.html]
  • [https://askubuntu.com/questions/303849/create-a-single-pdf-from-multiple-text-images-or-pdf-files/887953?newreg=46666755550348dfa59952b528b90745]
  • [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43225925/windows-cmd-pass-output-of-one-command-as-parameter-to-another]

Updated:

You May Also Enjoy