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I scan all my important incoming physical-mail to PDF. I am trying to move this activity to Linux as part of the process of eliminating my dependence on Windows - where I used to use the excellent but deeply proprietary NitroPDF to do the scanning and conversion.

So I have moved to using gscanpdf v 1.2.3 under Ubuntu 14.04 x_86_64 with a Canon LiDE scanner. If I scan an image in as 300DPI line-art it gives me a sensible file-size per page (about 150 kB) but for some reason although I have the page-geometry set to A4 in gscan2pdf the image always comes out as A0 (i.e. massive) which confuses a lot of readers and also makes printing of stuff awkward. So to illustrate I scanned a single page of A4:

tim@MERLIN:~/Documents/Scanned$ pdfinfo sample.pdf
Title:          LabourLeaflet
Subject:        NONE
Keywords:       NONE
Author:         001-MCC
Creator:        gscan2pdf v1.2.3
Producer:       PDF::API2
CreationDate:   Mon Aug 18 00:00:00 2014
ModDate:        Mon Aug 18 00:00:00 2014
Tagged:         no
Form:           none
Pages:          1
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      2380.8 x 3366.7 pts
Page rot:       0
File size:      117573 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4

which as you can see gives page geometry of A0. Now I can convert the page geometry using ImageMagick's convert command thus:

tim@MERLIN:~/Documents/Scanned$ convert sample.pdf -page A4 -compress zip sample1.pdf
tim@MERLIN:~/Documents/Scanned$ pdfinfo sample1.pdf
Title:          sample1
Producer:       ImageMagick 6.7.7-10 2014-03-06 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
CreationDate:   Tue Aug 19 10:04:36 2014
ModDate:        Tue Aug 19 10:04:36 2014
Tagged:         no
Form:           none
Pages:          1
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      595 x 842 pts (A4)
Page rot:       0
File size:      689083 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4

which as you can see gets the geometry right but causes the file to bloat to six times its original size.

So:

  1. Is there any way I can get gscan2pdf to respect the A4 page geometry I've set (ideal); or
  2. Can I get ImageMagick to change the page size without bloat; or
  3. Is there some other package I should be thinking about other than gscan2pdf and convert?
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  • I think you should ask in the ImageMagick forum for quicker respond.
    – Ooker
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 9:28
  • Strange, I use gscan2pdf to scan as well, and I get A4 with no problem (India here). I assume you are also using 1.2.5. I think this is a client-side problem, and the scanner has no bearing on this, but in any case, what is your scanner hardware exactly, and what driver are you using with it?
    – Faheem Mitha
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 10:48
  • 2
    @Ooker personally, I'd try and fix this problem at the gscan2pdf level.
    – Faheem Mitha
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 10:50
  • Check your setting in ~/.gscan2pdf. Does it show A4? I have "Paper size = A4" there.
    – Faheem Mitha
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 10:53
  • Faheem. Yes, the ~/.gscan2pdf file definitely contains the Paper size = A4. It's actually v 1.2.3 of gscan2pdf I'm using (that was the one that Ubuntu installed from the package manager when I did an apt-get...)
    – TimGJ
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 11:39

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

This bug appears to have been fixed in version 1.2.5 (I've upgraded to 1.2.5 and used the program several times and it has always selected the correct paper-size).

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0

got the same problem, and after fiddling a lot with the settings, an essential one is when saving, to have the compression (under the checkbox downsample) set to JPEG, and a reasonable quality (75 for instance). This really does the difference

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