One touch scanning requirement

[Storms]

Hi All,

I’m currently planning a small project at home to develop a document management system. The purpose of this is to scan all letters into an oracle database that can be queried by a web front end. I’ll be using JSP’s to achieve this.

Basically, the idea is to scan all correspondence to an ‘incoming’ folder; then for my web app to pick them up and store then into the database.

What I’m looking for is a one click scanning solution. So basically I want to be able to click the ‘scan’ button on the scanner and for the documents to automatically get stored to c:scanned_documentsincoming

I don’t want to have to open up another application in the middle… so basically it’s just one click on the scanner.

At this point I don’t even have a scanner, my questions are…

1. What scanner should I buy? Will it scan the documents to PDF?
2. Dooes the scanner come bundled with software that would allow ‘one click’ scanning? (I’m looking for something around £100).
3. if there is no bundled software out there to achieve one click scanning, what would be the best way to develop a small app to do this? (Can I use Java? or is another language more appropriate)

Thank you kindly,

Storms

PS This will be done on a Vista PC

[Storms]

UPDATE

I’ve ordered the CanoScan LiDE 200 Scanner from amazon for approx £60.

I believe it’s compatible with TWAIN and it advertises a auto-scan facility. I’m not sure exactly what the auto-scan does; i.e. does it just recognise you’ve put a doc in the scanner then you have to open up an app in Windows to actually complete the scan, or can yoiu configure it to do the whole scan process.

I’ll keep you updated with progress…. any advice from you guys is till welcome though!

[mmotovsk]

Regarding to “One touch scanning”, you can see the online solution developed especially for that purpose:
http://www.gnome.eu/Twain/examples/capabilities.html
You can find more information here:
http://www.gnome.sk/Twain/jtp_capabilities.html

Regarding to PDF:
Morena – Image Acquisition Framework for Java delivers scanned data via standard Java ImageProducer interface. So the task is: “How to save acquired data to the PDF file format, if the they are produced via ImageProducer interface?” It is the same task as if you produce image data from the image file. According the PDF file format, we have a feedback from our customers, that they have good experiences with iText, a free library for generating PDF files.
Here is a snapshot demonstrating how to save to pdf file using iText library:

TwainSource source = TwainManager.selectSource(null);

MorenaImage morenaImage = new MorenaImage(source);

Image image=Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(morenaImage);



com.lowagie.text.Image iTextImage=com.lowagie.text.Image.getInstance(image, null);

iTextImage.setAbsolutePosition(0, 0);

Document document=new Document(iTextImage);

PdfWriter

writer=PdfWriter.getInstance(document, tmp);

document.open();

PdfContentByte cb=writer.getDirectContent();

cb.addImage(iTextImage);

document.close();

But, you can use your preferable PDF libraries.

Martin Motovsky
Member of Gnome’s technical support

[Author]

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