Take the 2-minute tour ×

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, but...

I need a scanner (paper feed scanner) where depending on either a barcode, or number, or some identifier on the paper being scanned, creates a PDF file with a name based on that identifier.

For example: If I scanned a page with the number 12345 on the top-left of the page, a PDF file named 12345.pdf would be created.

Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated!

share|improve this question
add comment

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

If you looking for document scanner that has the capability to do batch separation using barcode and rename them base on barcode and zoned OCR you can try to do it with Fujitsu Scanner bundled with its software scan all pro. Other choice is you are using Kodak scanner with kodak capture but the software is sold separately and it quite costly. If you have an ISIS based scanner you can try Quick Scan Pro software to do it. I have used scan all pro since 3 years ago to digitalized million of pages and it works fine.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Have you looked at things like Readiris or SimpleOCR or other OCR alternatives to see if any of them have the features that you are after?

I have written a document scanner using Microsoft Access VBA that can grab pages from a document feeding scanner and output pdf files, and I'm currently rewriting it in Python, but I've not yet been bothered enough to figure out how to build some kind of OCR into it to as there doesn't seem to be many options for OCR in Python. Barcode Readers seem like an option as generally you can get ones which just give a serial data stream with the content of the barcode which could then just be used as the name of the file...

It seems like the kind of thing that should be available in the way of paid OCR solutions, I think you may need to go through evaluating which packages support bulk document scanning and rule based file saving.

share|improve this answer
add comment

This works in Linux for the case of a number at the top of the page. You can play with the scan parameters and the pdf conversion parameters to get what you want (compression, etc).

# Requires scanimage, tesseract and ImageMagick convert

# Scan the image to temp file. Change command for your scanner
scanimage -d hpaio:/usb/Deskjet_F4100_series?serial=CN7CH4T29D04TJ \
--mode Lineart --resolution 300 --compression None --format=tiff \
> out.tif

# OCR to tmp.txt file
tesseract out.tif tmp

# Extract first line --contains number (thanks Serverfault 66587)
read -r NUMBER < tmp.txt

# Convert image to pdf with the desired name
convert out.tif $NUMBER.pdf

# Clean up
rm out.tif tmp.txt

If you prefer bar codes, then you might try processing the image with gocr. It will read some types of bar codes. Extracting the resulting number is a bit tricky but can be done with a sed filter.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Sorry for answering a 3 year old thread, but I was in search of something like this too in the place I work in. After some research, I stumbled upon Batch Scan To Pdf that exactly does what you need in your description. Instead of regular barcodes however, they use QR-Codes. They are SUPER cheap compared to other ones I've seen. Hope this helps others who may need similar functionality.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


