I don’t like having an administration in dead-tree format, but there are those who insist on sending you all kinds of things in this format. To make this data easier to access and back up, I scan it to a digital format. I used to do this manually, with the GIMP, but I decided it was time for some automation. Therefore I wrote a script, which scans whatever you put under the lid of the scanner in lineart mode, and stores it very efficiently in a DjVu DjVuBitonal document. And here it is:

#! /bin/bash
# Author: halfgaar
 
# Prevent attacker from placing unholy replacements of system commands in your
# working path.
PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin"
 
# User settings
RESOLUTION="400"
SCANNER_DEVICE="plustek"
 
OUTPUT_FILE_BASENAME=$1
OUTPUT_FILE="$OUTPUT_FILE_BASENAME.djvu"
TEMP_FILE="/tmp/halfgaars_scanned_image"
 
[ ! -n "$OUTPUT_FILE_BASENAME" ] && "No filename given" && 1
 [ -e "$TEMP_FILE" ];
  "Temp file $TEMP_FILE already exists. We don't want to create a symlink vulnerability here..."
  1
 [ -e "$OUTPUT_FILE" ];
  "$OUTPUT_FILE already exists."
  1
 
# page dimensions are in mm
scanimage -d $SCANNER_DEVICE -x 210 -y 297 --mode lineart --resolution $RESOLUTION > $TEMP_FILE
cjb2 -dpi $RESOLUTION $TEMP_FILE $OUTPUT_FILE
 
rm $TEMP_FILE

Simple, but effective. I may extend it in the future to also be able to scan into a DjVuDocument file (a file containing both DjVuBitonal and DjVuPhoto segments), but for now, this serves.