#+title: printing and scanning on linux
#+pubdate: <2020-12-14>

** [[#h-6c57cb88-f33f-4a04-8556-fec4dbf4b574][printing]]
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: h-6c57cb88-f33f-4a04-8556-fec4dbf4b574
:END:

- 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

** [[#h-f7fe536a-882a-4ed7-9b9f-96e4638dac39][scanning]]
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: h-f7fe536a-882a-4ed7-9b9f-96e4638dac39
:END:

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

#+begin_src sh
$ # 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
#+end_src

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

** [[#h-addd5bf0-e140-409b-b5aa-d8f40c3c027a][pdf stuff]]
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: h-addd5bf0-e140-409b-b5aa-d8f40c3c027a
:END:

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:

#+begin_src
$ 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
#+end_src