scanning with hplip

had to reboot my computer and remember how to make the hp officejet scanner/printer scan for me again. turns out hplip won't run if cupsd and dbus are not started, and they weren't by default. hp-check is pretty handy for finding these kinds of problems. then, i actually use scanimage to do the scanning. i think it's part of the sane-backends package rather than hplip, but it works for me. scanimage --help shows scanner-specific options. this gives a good 150 dpi scan of a letter-size page: scanimage --resolution 150 -x 216 -y 279 > output.pnm the easiest way i've found to make a pdf out of the scanned pages is first to convert each one to a png, then to a pdf (both times with convert). then, use pdftk in*.pdf cat output out.pdf to assemble the pages. pretty good compression with the png conversion (even without forcing greyscale or b/w) and verified to work on windows.