Missing ScanTailor-CLI or at least (some) command line parameters to start main window

[vboehm]

I'm not using ScanTailor to scan books with hundreds of pages but to scan my correspondence. Many documents which mostly have 1 to 10 pages. All pages of one document are scanned into a single directory and so I wrote a short wrapper program, which is called with a list of all these directories, and itself uses eog (eye of gnome), scantailor-cli, in special cases scantailor, tiff2pdf, and ocrmypdf to convert these scans to nice annotated PDFs.

Now scantailor-cli is not available anymore and I tried to replace it with scantailor advanced. But since there is no description if there are any command line parameters (no man page, no '-h', '-?' or '--help' for any information), I have to

• start scantailor
• choose new project
• select a directory
• select all scanned images
• click about 12 times at the different stages of the ScanTailor process
• before the last step I always have to change the 600 dpi output resolution to 300 dpi
• store everything
• and leave the program

Since the former scantailor-cli call ran in the background, the new process takes at least 10 times longer than the old one (feels like 100 times). By trial I found out, that I can call scantailor with the name of a configuration file (the one you get when you select 'Save Project') and I managed to modify my program to create a rudimentary version of this configuration file (without the complex filters node) to start the program skipping the boring questions about directories and files.

Could you provide a (preferably documented) way to start ScanTailor with all information it needs for its work? Either by command line or a faked configuration file.

Or - the best solution - (please, please, please) provide the missing scantailor-cli again?

Thank you Volker

[mara004]

Good point, but it seems that ScanTailor Advanced is unmaintained, unfortunately. The CLI has been requested repeatedly in the past, e. g. in #1 or #118. The only point that you can fix easily is output DPI, which is configurable under Tools -> Default parameters ... -> Custom -> Output -> Output Resolution Maybe you'd be better off with a different branch of ScanTailor, like Universal or Experimental, which do have a working CLI. Or, perhaps even better, change your scripts to use unpaper which is well-documented, more powerful and gets better support. Another option would be to give gscan2pdf a try, which can do lots of automatic scan improvements (via unpaper) and even OCR. I hope this helps with your correspondence.

[mara004]

Now scantailor-cli is not available anymore and I tried to replace it with scantailor advanced.

@vboehm It is still available, though not in this version of ScanTailor. I guess scantailor-universal-cli would be best for you; it should work in exactly the same way as the scantailor-cli you're used to from the original program by @tulon. Simply go to the ScanTailor Universal releases page and follow the installation instructions, or build it from source (depending on what distribution you are using).