Flatbed scan a book and process it into a PDF

https://git.xpub.nl/pedrosaclout/Flatbed_Scanner_Workflow

A flatbed scanner is a commonly found piece of equipment that can be used to scan a book, essentially making a sequence of images from its pages. These scripts, written by Pedro Sá Couto do further work of processing the scans to produce a PDF with a selectable text layer.

Dependencies

brew (MAC) or apt-get (LINUX)

You’ll need the command-line tools for Xcode installed.

xcode-select --install

After, install homebrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Run the following command once you’re done to ensure homebrew is installed and working properly:

brew doctor

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip imagemagick poppler pdfunite

brew install python3 python3-pip imagemagick poppler pdfunite

pip3

Install all necessary packages with pip3:

sudo pip3 install pdf2image Pillow time logging opencv-python pytesseract

How to use the scripts

Your scans must look like this for the scripts to perform correctly.

                                   RIGHT PAGE
                             —————————————————————
                            |                     |
                            |——————————           |
                            |           |         |
                            |           |         |
                            |           |         |
                            |           |         |
                            |           |         |
                            |        01 |         |
                            |——————————           |
                            |                     |
                             —————————————————————
    
      LEFT PAGE                RIGHT PAGE
     —————————————————————   —————————————————————
    |                     | |                     |
    |           ——————————| |——————————           |
    |         |           | |           |         |
    |         |           | |           |         |
    |         |           | |           |         |
    |         |           | |           |         |
    |         |           | |           |         |
    |         | 02        | |        03 |         |
    |          —————————— | |——————————           |
    |                     | |                     |
     —————————————————————   —————————————————————

Add your pictures from the book scanner to the folder "/scans"

Make all the files executable:

sudo chmod 777 merge_scans.sh workshop_stream.sh marge_files.sh

In case you want to skip any of the scripts just comment out in the shell code, workshop_stream.sh.

Run ./workshop_stream.sh

Wait :)

Additional information

The workflow follows these scripts, in successive order:

Create 3 directories

mkdir split
mkdir ocred
mkdir cropped

Merge the files in the directory scans

All the scans will be appended to one pdf called out.pdf

./merge_scans.sh

Burst the pdf in scans

Burst this pdf, renaming all the files so they can be iterated later.

python3 burstpdf.py

Cropping the bounding boxes

The pages are now in their original position, but they have a bounding box. This script iterates through them and crops the highest contrast area found.

python3 bounding_box.py

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

In this part we OCR the jpg, turning these into PDFs.

python3 tesseract_ocr.py

Merge all the files and create the pdf

The OCRed pages are now joined into their final PDF, your book is ready :)

./merge_files.sh

License

The package is available as open source under the terms of the [MIT License](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).