Tag: DjVu

So, you have djvu files on a remote machine that you have SSH access to, and the local machine you’re working on doesn’t have djvu tools. What do you do? Simple, use ddjvu to decode the djvu files to images.

And that’s all. I kept forgetting the name of the tool, so, now I won’t anymore…

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.