Today I had to return a signed financial document. In short, I printed the document, signed it, scanned it, and returned it, using a secure web messaging service.
I had to figure out how to scan the paper document, with my signature, and create a PDF file for the recipient.
My scanner is a very simple flatbed scanner, an Epson Perfection V39. My Ubuntu 18 LTS desktop was able to recognize this device and I used the CLI to complete the following steps:
With a little trial and error, and past experience working with TIFF, PDF, and the like, I used the following commands:
This is what worked with my Epson Perfection V39
It worked on my Ubuntu 18 Destop, but, not my
Ubuntu 20 Laptop. It looked like an issue with
permissions, perhaps more. Maybe I had previously
done work to get this working with the Ubuntu 18
machines, but, I don't remember.
$ scanimage \
--format tiff \
--resolution 300 \
--mode Monochrome \
--scan-area Letter/Portrait > p001.tif
(repeat for each sheet, and specify new target tif)
The tiffcp command copies the pages
into a multipage tiff:
$ tiffcp p001.tif p002.tif all.tif
Finally, we convert the multipage tiff
to a PDF file
The -j option specifies jpeg compression
The -o option is followed by the output filename
$ tiff2pdf -j -o tickrFit-quick-start.pdf all.tif
References:
scanimage(1) - Linux man page - die.net