printing and scanning on linux

• Install CUPS, enable the service
• Install the gutenprint printer drivers
• Configure your printer in the CUPS interface, http://localhost:631/, and select the gutenprint drivers

I’ve never gotten xsane to work. scanimage did me good though:

$ # nb: might need sudo on scanimage
$ # list devices:
$ scanimage -L
$ scanimage -d '<device>' > result.pnm
$ # create a PDF with graphicsmagic
$ gm convert result.pnm result.pdf

After posting this, tan reached out to me and mentioned to checkout simple-scan as another gui option.

If you have a poppler utils package on your distro, you get pdfseparate and pdfunite. Be careful with the latter! If you don’t include a target output, you will squash yourself!

pdfseparate is rather odd, after specifying a pattern and range of pages, you get range n PDFs, with %d being swapped for the index in the pattern.

This is an example to swap out page 6 of 10 with the scanned result.pdf into an existing pdf:

$ cd $(mktemp -d)
$ pdfseparate -f 1 -l 10 'in-%04d.pdf'
$ ls
in-0001.pdf  in-0004.pdf  in-0007.pdf  in-0010.pdf
in-0002.pdf  in-0005.pdf  in-0008.pdf  in.pdf
in-0003.pdf  in-0006.pdf  in-0009.pdf
$ cp /path/to/result.pdf in-0006.pdf
$ pdfunite in-0*.pdf out.pdf