Call for ideas: Document scanner App

Flohack

Thread for collecting ideas about a potential document scanning App that is really missing from UT. Initially should take BW picture, auto-crop the page if possible, correct trapezoid and then save as PDF

wayneoutthere

sweet. i'm on the forum again thanks to this...

Ideas are as follows:

Phase 1
keep it simple for phase 1 and have the following features:
a) image to PDF export
b) auto white balance/contrast (probably can get from GIMP code or something)
c) auto crop if it's easy
d) share to email/telegram/whatever

Phase 2

a) "Fake-a-Fax" feature (GIMP photocopy filter feature added)
b) multi-page stitching (if it's easy of course put it into phase 1 since it's pretty important)
c) some kind of integration with Nextcloud? I feel like some kind of NC doc integration would be cool. Like this: scan doc, click 'share', click 'Nextcloud' option, it moves document to NC server, it creates a private share link, it copies share link to clip board, user can then share the new scan with NC share link

Ok... i'm out of ideas! Hope this helps

@flohack Optical Character Recognition would be really powerful, some way down the line.

advocatux

@flohack I remember reading a scanning apps for mobile phones comparative and these were the categories:

Captures Business Cards
Captures Text
Captures Multi-Page Docs
Captures Photos
Fax Capability
Prints from App
Includes OCR
Annotates Images

So if we want a really killer app, that's the target

AresMinos

Darktable has a great piece of code for doing perspective correction that could be very useful to do before cropping.

https://www.darktable.org/2016/03/a-new-module-for-automatic-perspective-correction/

doniks

@flohack said in Call for ideas: Document scanner App:

Call for ideas: Document scanner App

Mhm .... did you just open pandoras box How many, how far out ideas do you want?

I'd love to have an app with which I can scan receipts and have them stored and sorted per business trip and it OCRs the amounts and allows me to categorize and total them (different currencies!). At the end of the trip I need to get it out and enter into our expense claim system - (Don't even bother to interface with it, it's a weird 'ol system that looks like it was designed in the 80ies and they keep changing it around and just replaced it with another one that's even more awkward) - so, I'd like to get a csv file with the overview and a zip file with properly named and sorted pdfs over to my laptop.

Flohack

@advocatux Fax.... is weird, no man has any fax machines anymore

Flohack

@doniks Well we are in Unix world, so I promote to use multiple small tools instead of a big one. So the scanning App will scan your receipts, but the archival would be done by another APp tha receives the scanned image via Content Hub

So this is another call for ides

advocatux

@flohack yep that grabbed my attention too, even more having in mind that comparative is from 2018.

advocatux

the archival would be done by another app

@flohack nextcloud

I discussed with Jonatan a few weeks ago, and he told me he started to work on porting an app that existed from android to ubports : https://github.com/jonnius/camera-scanner

He said that there wasn't a GUI yet, I proposed to try to work for one, but unfortunately, I couldn't spend as much time as I would have wanted to.