things that quit working

By basd on Jul 3, 2010 | In linux, opensuse

I scan a lot of documents, so I use gscan2pdf. This has not been easy to maintain, as problems keep arising. But the weird part is it just quit working AND I had not done any software changes or upgrades.

...

For awhile, gscan2pdf was doing a weird thing where upon save to pdf it seemingly shifted the page over and wrapped it back to the other side. Which is to say, the two edges of the document were in the middle of the page, if you can visualize that. I worked around the problem by saving to djvu and then converting to pdf.

But then for no apparent reason, gscan2pdf quit saving altogether. The maintainers of the OpenSUSE version(s) in the build service seemingly withdrew their support, in that I can no longer find gscan2pdf in a search of the build service (although the repositories I have on my computer still have the .29 version. Some forum notes at opensuse indicate that you can't save if you have the current version of ImagMagick. But, I was not specifically having that problem AND I have a second computer (x64 instead of i586) on which gscan2pdf is still working.

Meantime, gscan2pdf has moved on to the .30 version, which requires dependencies not available in OpenSUSE rpms. I've built gscan2pdf from source beofre and it is time consuming, especially tracking down the dependencies -- and there are some new ones in this version -- which I imagine is why the maintainers have thrown in the towel at OpSu build service.

Xsane will work for me, but it is much less elegant than the gscan2pdf interface and therefore more time consuming to use. Also, although it does have some error correction, as far as I know there is not a simple way to run unpaper features. Lastly, I don't think Xsane saves to the djvu format.

So, oh well ... life with linux.

Even though I have some satisfactory work-arounds at the moment, I know this is going to eat on me until I find a solution ...