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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I used to scan documents that I wanted to keep, but frankly now I just take a photo on my phone. It's easier usually (pace dropboxes terrible interface), there are robbaly loads of apps to help, but imo, that's a whole class of hardware that's has been disrupted.

Who else used to use scanners?

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I have a networked all-in-one HP printer that can scan to a network share on my NAS. On the NAS, I set up a watcher script that runs OCRMyPDF [1] on any incoming PDFs. That gives me a super easy workflow, just feed documents into the scanner and a minute or two later, I have a fully OCRd PDF in my network share.

[1]: https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF

oh - that sounds interesting - I could do similar for items hitting my dropbox thank you !

I always have issues with lighting and reflections when using a camera. Scanners have the advantage of uniform controlled lighting.

A cheap lightbox with an opening for the camera would be interesting.

Scanners have the advantage not to distort the image what a photo inherently does. I do not know if today's phone cameras regard the spherical distortion, but I doubt as this would require to have several distance measures I guess those cameras don't have.

It just doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is if the text (information) that's being imaged is readable for person receiving it.

Apps like Office Lens will undistort the pic and it just looks good enough. (App knows you are taking a picture of A4 page, so it knows how to make it look straight + white.)

Sometimes it does matter - a particularly small font, a colour document, watermarks, etc. Can render it unsuitable.

I used to use CamScanner. The scanning mode will take a distorted document, find the edges and output a "flattened" document. For me, this was usually more than enough to look like a scan.

  > CamScanner

And then it got bought and malware added. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818177

These days on Android, Google Drive's scan functionality works just as well as CamScanner used to. I use it for a lot of cases where I'd previously use a proper scanner - it's good enough most of the time.

Or even Google Lens / Google Camera does a decent job of scanning in the special scan document mode, although you have to rely on the software actually recognizing that's what you're trying to do to get the button to show up to start the process.

I used to use scanners, until I bought a new Brother laser printer and discovered that the scanner feature requires a proprietary driver on the computer end. It's sad as Brother printers tend to work really well with linux, for printing at least.

Since then I've written an ImageMagick script that converts phone photographs of documents into reasonably convincing "scans."

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