[plug] Printing, scanning, was Re: simple usb doc scanner into PDF and storer for Ubuntu

[Nick Bannon]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 04:27:43PM +0800, Shanon Loughton wrote:
> Im looking for something that would scan a document, even If I feed one page
> at a time, is small, and what tools needed in linux to scan n store in PDF,
> preferably with word recognition.  Docs are mostly printed.

Sorry, can't give you a definite answer on the OCR, either, there's a
number of options and none of them are perfect. Tell us what you find.

However, I've recently tried a couple of scanners. First, a very handy
wand scanner, $149 (though perhaps it's cheaper online somewhere?):
http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=XC4909&keywords=scanner&form=KEYWORD
http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/products/technology/printers-and-scanners-and-faxes/scanners/piportscan

It takes a micro SD card and works much like a digital camera - battery
powered, drag it over the page and it will save pictures as JPEGs. Use
the supplied USB cable to read the card later, or remove the card to read
elsewhere.

Second I bought a nice, cheap, Canon PIXMA MX340 printer/scanner/copier/fax:
http://staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=mx340

Again, you don't need a computer, you can scan onto a USB thumb key (it
came with a free 2GB one and some photo paper). You can scan several
pages at once, either a single page, or feed several pages through
automatically into a multi-page PDF or as images.

If you add a Bluetooth adaptor you can also print with PictBridge from a
suitable phone or camera. It wants a Canon BU-30, perhaps there are
other compatible ones? ...but the one I tried doesn't work, I'd like to
know what a Canon BU-30 identifies itself as in lsusb.

The printer and scanner drivers install quite nicely on Ubuntu "Lucid
Lynx" 10.04, on a 32-bit i386 eeePC. They've been packaged by Canon, some
(but not all?) source is downloadable. Someone did want to package it for
Debian (and hence Ubuntu), but they don't seem to have done so. Someone
else found that they _did_ work on a 64-bit machine as well. Wish I
could read the full "on screen" manual, but that's hidden in a Windows
or MacOS X installer.

Package: cnijfilter-common
Package: cnijfilter-mx340series
Package: scangearmp-common
Package: scangearmp-mx340series

http://support-my.canon-asia.com/P/search?as_q=&model=PIXMA+MX347&menu=manual&filter=0
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=433555
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1518425

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal