Console utilities in Linuxes are cool: mcabber for jabber, mutt for mail, mocp for music, vim to rule them all! This note is about scaning from the console (I assume your scanner is already set-up). Aim is to scan document with good quality into pdf with reasonable size.
Scanning is done by scanimage utility:
scanimage --resolution 300 --mode Color --format tiff > document.tiff
If there is more than one scanner in your system, list them all by scanimage -L commant and use specify name with --device-name argument.
Next step is to convert tiff into pdf image. It can be done with imagemagick:
convert document.tiff document-big.pdf
But resulting pdf is too big and must be reduced. I’ve found shrinkpdf bash script very helpful for this purpose with correction: IMHO 72 DPI resolution is too small, so I’ve changed it to 300 dpi. Essential part of that script is ghostscript call:
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/screen \
-dEmbedAllFonts=true \
-dSubsetFonts=true \
-dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \
-dColorImageResolution=300 \
-dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \
-dGrayImageResolution=300 \
-dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \
-dMonoImageResolution=300 \
-sOutputFile=document.pdf \
document-big.pdf