since time immemorial (well, almost) i own a private epson 1260 scanner. a couple of weeks ago i — foolishly, as it turns out now — offered to my in-laws to copy all lake district articles out of our country walking collections. foolishly, because i realized that country walking must have their offices on one of those lonesome, remote fells: there are lots and lots and lots and lots of lake district articles and routes in country walking.

i started off with the gscan2pdf tool — really slow to start up, at that speed summer would be over before i had everything scanned in and converted to PDF. not good.

next try: kooka, KDE 3.5′s own scan tool — faster, but non-intuitive, you apparently have to rename and save each individual file. winter time before i’d be done.

i noticed, once again, that the epson 1260 does have a scan button (and a print and a mail and a web button) — if only that were working under linux. last time i checked for a tool (gazillion years ago), there was nothing, zilch, nix available to utilize that button. googling for plustek and scan button (the scan chipset inside the epson 1260 is a plustek chipset) this time did turn up something: scanbuttond! and even better: it’s available as a ubuntu package in hardy heron:

% apt-get install scanbuttond

installed the beast. following the instructions on the gentoo wiki gave me a working one-button-scan process! i modified the scan script slightly to deposit the fresh scan in my $HOME/tmp/scans/ directory.

converting a bunch of JPG images into a single PDF is also quite easy: you imagemagick’s convert command:¹

% convert *.jpeg allinone.pdf

voila!