Nicollet.Net

Every piece of (useful) snail mail I receive is scanned and stored both on my computer and on a remote backup server. The scanner itself cost me around 50€ (it’s a Canon LIDE 50 of which I am quite happy, especially since it is perfectly compatible with the latest SANE libraries on my Ubuntu). In order to improve the efficiency of the process in terms of time I have to waste doing things, I have written a short script that interacts with sane (for scanning) and ncftp (for uploading to the backup server) and lets me enter elementary information on the command line.

Here is the code:

let prompt s =
  print_string s ;
  flush stdout

let make_directory dirname =
  let command = "mkdir " ^ dirname in
    0 = Sys.command command

let base_path = "/home/arkadir/docs/"

let scan_command =
  "scanimage -l 0 -t 0 -x 215 -y 297 --brightness -22 --contrast 22 --resolutio\
n 300 --progress --mode Gray --format=tiff 2> /dev/null"

let scan_to_file filename =
  let command = scan_command ^ " | convert tiff:- " ^ filename in
    0 = Sys.command command

let scan_files base =
  let rec aux i =
    let filename = base ^ "/page" ^ string_of_int i ^ ".png" in
      if scan_to_file filename then
        begin
          ignore (Sys.command ("display " ^ filename));
          prompt "Scan successful. Enter any string to continue, nothing to stop. " ;
          let line = read_line () in
            if line <> "" then aux (i+1)
        end
      else
        begin
          prompt "Scan FAILED. Enter any string to retry. " ;
          let line = read_line () in
            if line <> "" then aux i
        end
  in aux 1

let rec upload_files dirname =
  print_endline "Uploading files..." ;
  let command =
    "ncftpput -R -f "^base_path^"ftp.cfg scans "^dirname
  in
    if 0 <> Sys.command command then begin
      prompt "Upload FAILED! Enter any string to retry. " ;
      let line = read_line () in
        if line <> "" then upload_files dirname
    end

let process =
  prompt "Document name: " ;
  let line = read_line () in
    if line = "" then print_endline "No filename entered, aborting."
    else
      let dirname = base_path ^ line in
        if not (make_directory dirname) then
          print_endline ("Could not create directory " ^ dirname ^ ", aborting.")
        else begin
          scan_files dirname;
          upload_files dirname
        end

So far, I’m keeping the data as high-resolution PNG files, which means about 8MiB for every file. I will be moving to the DjVu compression format as soon as possible, and update my script accordingly.