Image Scanner

Skanlite 2.0.1

Scanners are a little like the printers they're so often attached to these days – they're an old technology whose usefulness keeps them in many of our offices. Despite nearly all communications being digital, there still seems to be a need for physical documents and their resultant photocopies and digital copies, which means we still need to use scanning software to control the hardware that makes these copies. Thanks to the SANE back end, Linux has had excellent scanner support for years, and most graphical applications, such as Gimp, will let you import images whenever you need them. But, many more applications are no longer being developed, especially when you need a perfunctory office application that will just let you get the job done.

Skanlite has been KDE's default scanning tool for a while, and this is a major update (plus bugfix) that finally sees this essential tool make it to Qt5. This is important because at 600 or 1,200dpi, scanning can still place quite a toll on your system's memory and storage, and the latest versions of Qt are much better at handling this than the old versions. I also really like Skanlite's UI, as it does a good job at mimicking the similarly perfunctory utilities that come bundled with both Apple's OS X and Microsoft Windows, which is ideal for when Linux is being used in an office, which is where this is going to be most useful. As you'd expect, you can preview the page you're about to scan, adjust resolution, and process the image as it's being scanned, saving you time when you need to use OCR or send a signed document onward. Skanlite works exactly as you'd expect, and I'm genuinely thankful that the developers have taken the time to future-proof a fundamental tool when similar tools have been left languishing.

Project Website

https://www.kde.org/applications/graphics/skanlite

Until printers and scanners finally cancel themselves out, Linux is great at ensuring old hardware scanners still work.

Time Waster