Go Paperless in Your Home or Office with Gscan2PDF for Linux

I've recently become very frustrated with the stacks of paper cluttering up my home, office and workspace. It's clumsy to wade through when I need a specific piece of information, and I hate keeping up with stuffed file folders. What could I do? I've gone almost completely paperless with the open source Gscan2PDF application for the Linux platform.

Gscan2PDF allows the user to easily scan multiple pages of a document directly into PDF format, with support for rearranging and renumbering pages. In addition, Gscan2PDF has built in digital character recognition, so much of the text in your documents will be searchable. When saving the final product, you can easily attach metadata like title, subject, author, date, and keywords to your PDF for easy finding with an application like Google Desktop Search, Beagle, or Tracker.

The first step you'll need to take to start using Gscan2PDF is to obtain the application. If you're using Ubuntu, a very popular distribution of Linux, then it will be available in the application repositories. For other distributions, see the project home page at http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/.

If your scanner is supported by the Linux operating system, then Gscan2PDF will detect it automatically at startup. You'll see two empty panes in a large window. The leftmost pane displays thumbnail previews of the pages in your document, while the larger right pane displays the current page in full size. Of course, you can pan, zoom in and out, and do basic image manipulation right from there.

To get your first document scanned, click on the scanner icon on the toolbar. A dialog with options will appear. The first option you'll see is designation for how many pages to scan. This is meant for use with scanner than can automatically feed multiple pages, so if you're using a flat-bed scanner, keep the number at "1." You'll still be able to scan in more pages, don't worry! There's also an option for double sided scanning, if your scanner supports it.

Finally you'll see a couple processing options that are very useful when creating a PDF version of your paper document. "Unpaper" will reduced marks like crinkles and creases, while OCR will identify text to make it a fully searchable PDF.

The second tab in that dialog allows you to set paper size, color mode, and scanning resolution. I recommend scanning at least 150 dots per inch for your documents, just to ensure you'll be able to print a decent copy at a later date if it's needed.

Setting the paper size did not work very well for me, so I had to use the "manual" setting to define the dimensions of my scanner in pixels. This was definitely annoying, however my scanner has known issues with Linux, so may be no fault of the application's.

Once you have all your settings the way you'd like, just press "scan," and off you go! Once the scan is complete, you'll see it in the main pane of the application, where you'll be able to rotate the image and apply other post-processing filters. To add another page, simply scan in another document! When you're all done, press the PDF icon, and you'll be able to save you complete project as a single PDF with all sorts of metadata attached.

A great feature that Gscan2PDF that really rounds it out for me is the ability to import and edit other PDF documents. So if you made an error, or you want to add a page to your PDF, simply import it! You'll be able to scan in more pages, rearrange the pages, and then save it again. I've already been using this feature to add metadata to web receipts and other documents that I printed directly to PDF.

Even though my scanner isn't completely supported, I've already been able to use Gscan2PDF to begin to go completely paperless. The application is simple and intuitive, and does what does awesomely. What's more, it's completely free! Even if you're not going the completely paperless route, and you just need to backup or transfer some of your documents digitally, then Gscan2PDF is for you.

Free your data by making it digital! Get better piece of mind by backing it up, and enjoy the benefits of fully searchable documents by using Gscan2PDF. I definitely recommend it.