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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I’ve done that makes my paper handling process much easier is have my printer/scanner point to a write only samba share. Most HP printers support this. I wrote a short script that looks for new files in there (with inotify), runs OCR on them with OCRMyPDF and moves them to a different file share. It means that my non-technical family members can just stick the paper in the document feeder, and 20 seconds later, an OCRed copy ends up on the family file share. You don’t get the fancy tagging and search that this provides, but file shares integrate natively into all OSs, which is a huge perk.

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I've done something similar although I had to jump through a few hoops to get it to work.

I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap which is one of those feed-through scanners. I have it hooked up to a Raspberry Pi which listens for the button press on the scanner. You press the button, the paper feeds through the scanner and once it has finished the scan a script runs to collate everything into a PDF and drops the result onto a Samba share that's running on the box where paperless-ngx is.

It's pretty neat and feels seamless. The worst part was dealing with SANE and finding linux drivers for my scanner.

I don’t understand the Pi and button part. I also have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and just configure it to save to a Samba share.

What does listen for button press mean? and how?

I'm not sure how I would do that on my model (ScanSnap S1300i), it connects over USB and has no touchscreen/control interface or network port, or wifi capability, you have to connect it to a computer via USB.

This works fine on say, a Mac, with the official Fujitsu ScanSnap software, and I'm guessing _that_ supports saving to a samba share, but I wanted a solution that's

1. completely headless, i.e. no desktop machine required and experience needs to be friction free as the headless part means the only way to interact with the scanning function is to press 1 button

2. linux compatible, as I wanted to connect it to a Pi. I had to dig for the drivers, Fujitsu didn't have the right ones for my model on their website!

I couldn't find any official software from Fujitsu, but I found the drivers eventually, so ended up coming up with connecting the scanner to the Pi over USB and glueing the bits together to drop the PDFs onto the samba share

The button is located on the scanner, and I run "scanbd" [1] to listen for the button press, this is what coordinates the scan function (feeding the paper through) and then post-scan -> running a script to collate + create PDFs

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Scanner_Button_Daemon

I have a SnapScan N1800 which makes a big difference and eliminates these complications.

I've got this setup with a Brother ADS-1700W scanner, which can write directly to a network share over wifi. Paperless-ngx is running on my NAS which hosts the share as well.

Are all your scans straight or do you also get skewed scans regularly? It's one of my disappointments with the ADS-1700W, a Xerox MFD scanner outputs all straight scans.

If you have any notes on this, I’ve been wanting to set this up for ages and I’d be incredibly grateful!

My solution was pretty much the same as what this guy did, although he had a slightly different model of scanner to me, but it's a very similar setup

https://chrisschuld.com/2020/01/network-scanner-with-scansna...

I started with a script similar to the one you're using (though hand-crafted) with my ScanSnap S1500 (though I have mine run the PDF conversion in the background so I can immediately scan another document without having to wait - this is easy to do now with scanpdf). I've been doing this for about 12 years now, originally manually sorting into directories and using "pdfgrep" to find stuff but more recently I've put everything into a paperless-ngx instance (gradually tagging all the old documents).

I've switched my hand-crafted scripts recently to use scanpdf[1] which seems to give better results (once I tweaked it to be a little less eager to downconvert to B+W). I experimented with using OpenCV models for cropping and straightening (based on examples in a stackoverflow thread at [2]) but I found results were worse than scanpdf so far.

1. http://badge.fury.io/py/scanpdf 2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28935983/preprocessing-i...

Paperless-ngx supports a folder on disk that you can drop files into and have them ingested. Throw in a samba container pointed at the same directory in your docker-compose and you’ve replicated the same setup.

Do you have any other info on how to do this? I've looked for this but cannot find how to do

I wanted to read the article, but it was incredible twitchy on my iPhone.

I scan into a Samba share that paperless-ngx picks up automatically, OCRs, tags, and deletes.

A web application is pretty cross platform too, at this point.

Plus I can get to them on my phones with less trouble than a share.

Yeah, I was looking at the docs for this and it looks like a somewhat more featureful version of what I’ve stuck together.

How does it handle when you have digital documents you want to store (a la google drive or similar)?

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