[plug] Creating multiple-page PDFs from scanned images

[Gavin Chester]

On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 16:04 +0800, Alex Nordstrom wrote:

There is always more than one way to skin a cat, other ways to consider
doing this via a gui and cli are:

> To this end, I'd like some ideas on how best to collate scans of 
> multiple individual pages into PDFs.

you could continue to scan them and convert to individual pdfs with
imagemagik, but then combine into one or more bigger pdfs to suit.  I
found a good reference to combining multiple pdfs into single files at
"Putting together PDF files" -
<http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/06/09/1844259>

I've used ghostscript to good effect like described therein :-)

> So far, what I've been doing is to scan the pages with Kooka, drag
> the 
> image files into an Open Office document with no margins, manually 
> anchor each image as characters (apparently, you can't do multiple
> ones 
> or make this the default) so that they don't just end up on top of
> one 
> another, and finally export the document to PDF. 

Another way to eliminate some steps compared to what you describe is to
insert/create individual picture frames on a page in OO.o and scan
directly into it.  ie, eliminate kooka (or Xsane) as an unnecessary
step.  You can paste each image file where you want, as big as you want,
dictated by the frame you create.  Better yet, use a page layout program
like scribus.  Then you can create your pdfs from each of those
multi-page documents.  Look at the settings for image compression in
your pdf so that they don't end up so big.  I have found that you can
rarely get better compression than the original jpg/png file when making
them into pdfs, but if your settings are wrong it can actually expand
the file size, like you found.

HTH, for starters.

Gavin