Understanding scanners
 

We have need of a way to scan in documents and photos for tweaking and printing. One of the requirements is a way to convert files to proper black and white. So far we have been using phones or digital cameras to create .jpg files and then sending to a printer. One of the issues is that many documents are not brilliant white background and the tint seems to be enhanced when we print causing excessive use of the black cartridge and often too dense printing of the black areas. Pages come from the printer very wet and need to be laid out to dry before collating.

We have picked up several printer/scanner units, mostly old, some of which work as photo copiers. We have found Windows drivers for a couple of the devices. What do we need to get to allow a document to be scanned into a computer?

We have access to Win8 , 10 or Linux Mint laptops handy. My Linux Mint machine seems to find the necessary driver for any printer we connect to it, I don't know if it will cope with finding a scanning driver.......

Someone suggested getting a cheap Ipad to do the photo and send to a printer...... I don't have any experience of Apple products. Are they the magic solution for us?

Rans6...................

ps I obviously have the Gimp editor on my Mint machine(s) which is a very capable editor, I might not live long enough to learn to use it to do what we want. Seems to be totally OTT for the job we have in hand.

Give this a go:Gimp can create a 1 bit - black/white image.

I also recommend using a black backing sheet for any scanning. This will absorb any light that passes through the paper from being reflected back. The reflection is a problem because anything printed on the back of the page will also stop light from being reflected back, which causes what is on the far side to bleed through.

This will leave the only light reflected from the front of the paper and therefore only the ink on the front will stop that to render an image.

The reason for the white backing typically used is that on toner-based copiers a black border can cause the paper to stick to the fuser making for a paper jam. On most scanners you can tell the software to limit the area to be scanned so that no part of the black backing is directly recorded.

Are you trying for genuine black and white or a grey scale just shifted so the grey tint becomes white?

In a home context I've found telling the scanner driver to scan black and white or grey scale and do a two pass scan to set the threshold works well.

I think even the built-in Windows paint will talk to a scanner if the driver is installed.

It can be done in Photoshop using levels but it's very fiddly. GIMP is bound to have an equivalent, and I think paint.net does too (and is much easier to get started with).

I did once automate a black and white workflow using Imagemagick but the requirement there was fast and cheap, not quality.

A great Windows app is VueScan. You can set it to scan B&W, and it will give you a 1 bit depth image, i.e. black, and white.
https://www.hamrick.com/

It does a great job, even on older scanners.

Alternatively if you use an Android phone CamScanner does a really good job of recognising the edges, straightening the document up, and giving you a PDF (with text recognition, if you want). Alternatively there is Microsoft Lens, which is also good.

HTH

I used to do that as well, always kept a black A3 sheet of paper handy for scanning double sided documents...

Useful info ta. I am going to have another go at working Gimp. We found that my Linux Mint machine is happy to talk to one of our old scanners using "Document Scanner" so I scanned in a crossword from a newspaper. I then cropped it to size to remove all of the stuff around it, turned the background white, saved the file and then loaded it into Gimp. I can't figure out how to control the size of the picture. It is a bit of a culture shock compared to other editors I have been faced with. Usually you set the paper size in the editor and then enter the text into it. Gimp opens with a massive canvas and imports my cropped document little bigger than a postage stamp. If I do print preview and fit to page it appears as a small part in the middle of a vast page. I want to print it A4. There must be a way to shrink the page and zoom the part of the image I want printed to be comfortable for me to write in the boxes................

Oh, I forgot to find a black sheet to put behind the page.........

Playing.

Win 10 has a Scan app, never used it so can't vouch for it. Paint.net also has an import from scanner function

Oh - I just saw "Create -> Import from scanner/camera" on the GIMP menu. It uses the TWAIN driver that should be available for most scanners.

When it comes to image size on screen, GIMP really takes a turn. Just use it some. I used Adobe Photoshop a lot and really liked it, but Adobe has priced themselves out of my needs. I am annoyed at how terrible the GIMP help is, though I am likely behind on releases; I usually use Google search and describe what I am seeing/wanting to do and quite often the answer is easily found.

When you say "import" is this just by Opening the file? Or are you saying "New"?

It should default to the size of the image; maybe the software didn't actually crop it? I've seen that before.

People used to do that in MS Word all the time and all Word was doing was marking areas not to display. I'd get a 2 page report that had a little image on it and it was 20MB at a time when floppy disks were still in common use. Find the picture and it's 10 times the size of the page with only a little bit exposed. Tell Word to reduce and it became like a 10 kB file.

Using GIMP to edit the 'Levels' on a scanned document is easy and can dramatically improve scanned documents by making the paper appear whiter.

Colors / Levels on the top menu and play with the 3 sliders on the histogram.

Then export to pdf.

Phones and iPads can make very good document copies, but only if you can sort out the lighting, which is much harder than it sounds. Uneven lighting and shadows which seem invisible to the naked eye become very obvious in a scan.

I think you are the right track with lighting being an issue. Front and rear light conditions need to be just right. The actual scanner obviously controls the lighting very well, something you don't realise when using a phone/camera to capture the image. I have had a bit of success with GIMP now and will persevere. What I did was a bit hit and miss and I didn't write down the method.......... but the result was better than I expected.

Thanks for your help with this.

Rans6..............

I'll add an endorsement for VueScan, an excellent tool all round.
Is your issue trying to remove a background tint, yellowed pages and so on? Setting the white balance level with a preview scan can help there.
If you're trying to reduce the size of the scanned files, then most of the common tools should have a way to convert colour to black-and-white. If you have diagrams as well then greyscale will work better and still reduce file sizes.
If your documents are text-only, and all you want is the text, how about a text recognition application? That would reduce file sizes a lot.

"A great Windows app is VueScan. You can set it to scan B&W, and it will give you a 1 bit depth image, i.e. black, and white.
https://www.hamrick.com/ "

Another vote for Viewscan - it knows about the drivers for thousands of scanners, even very ancient.
Besr scanning software you can buy - regular free updates.

Mac

I will recommend Vuescan as well if you want to get almost any scanner working in Windows.

As for some of the other issues mentioned:
- Apple stuff is very good, but it's not magic. If you just want to get to B&W images, I think you're on the right track with your current setup. If you want to get text from documents, I have used my iPhone to take a photo of the documents in question and I am then able to select the text on the photo and copy that to a document. There are errors, but going through the text and correcting those is a lot quicker than having to type the whole lot myself.
- Learning how to use levels in images will help you a lot. I am not a Gimp user myself so cannot help you there but it is the most-used function on Photoshop for me.
- When working with images and scans you run into the dpi and ppi settings and that may lead to what you described: a very small scanned image on a very large canvas. When scanning, you set the dpi setting the scanner/software uses. 300 dpi means that any inch on the image is translated using 300 dots or pixels. So more dpi equals more data in your image. Setting it low may lead to the small image you saw in Gimp. If you want to print stuff again, you are once again translating pixels to a physical size on a piece of paper. If you don't have enough pixels you get a fuzzy image. Depending on your printer, 200 or 300 ppi may work well but for high quality print work (photos and such) you may need a much larger number. If Gimp starts with a large canvas of a couple of thousand pixels on each side and you then load a scanned image that is only a couple of hundred pixels wide... you end up with the situation you described. Stretching that scanned image so it fits the canvas will make it fuzzy, as you cannot add information. Either starting with a smaller canvas in Gimp (that fits the size you want to print at) and/or scanning at a higher dpi will get these parameters closer together.

Apologies if I'm teaching you how to suck eggs and such.... hope this helps.

Thanks again everyone. SWMBO was on her crusade this afternoon - I just need something that works! Someone told her an Ipad would photo documents and convert them to crisp black and white, talk to any printer and output without buying any software or interconnect cables. I have no experience of anything Apple so could neither confirm nor deny any of this or even guess if it might be the answer.

We do have a Samsung, long in the tooth tablet but it doesn't do any of the task any better than my Samsung phone. Her Samsung phone is grinding to a full stop due to a 15GB hidden file that nobody has been able to remove.

I am quite happy with the old scanner/linux Mint laptop and Gimp solution but SWMBO demands something she is familiar with namely Windows or a new, cheap, tablet yet to be sourced. She did download the trial version of VueScan (VeiwScan?) but it failed to run and then she got a request for money to make it go and baulked at the whole thing as it seemed like a scam.

I will get her to transition to Linux Mint, eventually and then at least we will be on common ground.

Rans6..................

ps file size is not an issue, non of the stuff is going to need to be emailed out. After tweaking we only need to print the pages. Getting rid of the background hue is going to save a lot of expense in printer cartridges.

The official site for Vuescan is this one: https://www.hamrick.com/ Just make sure your downloading from them and not from anywhere else. I have never had a problem making it work, and you should be able to try out the software before paying, but I have been on a paid version for a long time so my experience may be outdated by now.

The iPad sales pitch that someone tried to put on your significant other does sound great, but I suspect that it is not the magic wand it is made out to be. Yes, the standard software can do a lot, but you still will need a way to edit your images. If you want to do this with an iPad the trick is going to be lighting, as you will need strong, colour corrected lighting to make sure you're not getting a colour cast on your photos. It could work... but I cannot guarantee that. Using a scanner set to produce a B/W output is going to be a much easier solution.

Just a quick question, I've tried VueScan, but it doesn't work as I haven't a driver for the scanner (CanoScan 4200F) . Canon don't do a driver for modern versions of Windows. Catch 22.

Any way around this?

Genius Scan for iPhone
 

I have been using Genius Scan on my iPhone (Download from the App Store)

Fabulous piece of kit, have been using it for scanning receipts, A4 documents etc. Can do Text Recognition and offer different page dimensions as well as offering output in pdf or JPEG.

Can then save to my Box folder on my PC.

According to the Vuescan website, the Canon 4200F is supported under Windows. You will need to install the drivers from this page I guess: https://www.canon-europe.com/support...uage=EN&os=all Just download the x32 or x64 version you can find there and install those. Are you on Win 10 or 11? You should be able to install the older driver set in Win 10 at least.