Image handling in a Unix/Linux-based filePro site

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009, Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>A prospect and I recently worked through some possible procedures and 
>approaches to managing images, primarily scanned documents received by his 
>office. He wanted to control the whole process - scan, upload, index, 
>view, and print - from his Unix-based filePro.
>
>He had been advised against storing the images in blobs within filePro (I 
>don't know the pros and cons of that), so he is interested in storing 
>separate image files on Unix, but tracking them all in filePro.
>
>Many necessary functions are provided by AnzioWin, our higher-function 
>terminal emulator. It has an image viewer, scanner control, printing, file 
>format conversion, and file transfer (several kinds).

We did a system that did most/all of this over 10 years ago,
running on Linux with a web interface so all searches and queries
could be done via a standard browser.

The scanning was handled by Perl::Tk scripts that controlled the
scanner, creating two files per page, the image, and text after
OCR'ing the page (I would use python today :-).  We used scanning
and OCR software from Vividata, a company that I could not
recommend considering the business issues we had with them (even
after I patched Linux SCSI drivers to handle ADF on Ricoh scanners).

The open source ImageMagick package has all the command line
tools necessary to manipulate images, as does the PIL (Python
Image Library) to handle them in python scripts.

THe biggest issue with this type of system is scanning the
documents.

I am currently using the commercial VueScan software, available
on OS X, Linux, and Windows, and a relatively inexpensive HP
ScanJet 5529 with an ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) that
does duplex scanning.  VueScan can easily create multiple page
files, usually PDF, and has built-in OCR (which I have not
really tested).

If I were doing this today, I would probably put everything into
a Plone system as it provides all the indexing and organization
tools with excellent security with very little work.  It can
store data either in the the Zope database, in an SQL database,
or on the file system depending on your needs.

Bill
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