Scan document pages to a compressed PDF

[Ed Suominen]

Replying to my own post, this looks like a very promising tool:

"Pytiff is a library for using TIFF files and advanced imaging in Python."
http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~omh221/software_projects/pytiff/pytiff.html

Ed Suominen wrote:

> I'd like to write a Python-based commandline tool that will scan pages
> with SANE, applying CCITT Group 4 compression during scanning, and produce
> a single PDF file. I would release it under GPL. Right now, I'm relying on
> a workable but inflexible shell script that pipes stuff between scanimage,
> tiffcp, tiff2ps, and ps2pdf.
> 
> What's the best way currently to do CCITT4 compression (e.g., of
> intermediate TIFF-format images) from Python? PIL doesn't seem to support
> CCITT4 compression, and the read-only patch [1] that's available won't
> help in my case. I'd like to incorporate as much as possible into the
> Python code and imported packages, rather than relying on pipes to a bunch
> of external programs.
> 
> Same question regarding SANE -- I can't seem to find the supposed PIL
> support for SANE in the release on my system. Anyone know about that, or
> alternatives?
> 
> ---
> Ed Suominen
> Registered Patent Agent
> Open-Source Software Author (yes, both...)
> Web Site: http://www.eepatents.com
> 
> [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2003-July/002354.html