Looking for a Document Photo → Scan App

General system Applications
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There is this very useful Android app called Notebloc which takes as input a photo of a document and outputs an image with fixed perspective and lighting, so that the final product looks like a properly scanned document.

I am looking for a GNU/Linux program (should be FOSS) that does that, preferably from the terminal, but GUI is also okay, if it can do batch jobs. Now, I can do this manually in GIMP, but it is slow and cumbersome. I want something automatic and specialised.

Here is a photo of a piece of A4 paper with some hieratic1 calligraphy practice and then the result of running it through the Android app.

scan

I really want something like that on GNU/Linux.

1 Off-topic footnote: Hieratic script is nothing but a very cursive, handwritten form of Egyptian hieroglyphic script, which was used to write stuff with ink on papyrus, as drawing more elaborate hieroglyphs would be cumbersome and time consuming, a bit like using GIMP for turning photographed documents into scanned ones… For anyone interested, this is a very brief excerpt from The Tale of Sinuhe, a heroic, epic Middle Egyptian (around 1900 B.C.) story written in the form of a tomb autobiography, comparable in beauty and literary craftsmanship to the works of Shakespeare. The Biblical story of David vs. Goliath probably originates from this story.

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I’m using Scan Tailor (yay scantailor) for this purpose. It can produce very good scan-like images of photographed documents.

It allows for warp correction and can get pretty good black and white images out of photos with text on various colors of paper or with irregular shadows on it.

Very comprehensive tool. It is sometimes a lot of manual work for seriously badly taken photos, but the results are incredibly good. It has an auto mode which I never used because I usually have extremely badly taken photos of text sent to me to process.

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Thanks! I will give it a try!

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Great topic. I do a lot of document scanning and was relying on my phone to do the same (different app but same process). For larger documents though it got a bit tedious so great to hear there’s a desktop alternative…dunno why it never occurred to me to search for one :joy:

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