Scanned Image Utility

[Hoakie]

I recently obtained a lot of old WW mags from a friend that he was getting rid of. Since I didn't want to keep them myself, I scanned only the articles of interest. I kept them in separate directories by the title of the article but didn't rename them from image1.jpg, image2.jpg, etc. The problem I ran into is that each time i want to look at the article I have to open all the pages as separate images. This was especially cumbersome since i didn't give each one a unique name.

Being a software developer, I decided to write a little utility that will go through a directory and pull its contents into a PDF file (it will also go through sub directories).

If you are interested in trying it out feel free, you can get a copy of the application here Just unzip the files to a directory of your choice and run the executable. Select a source directory where your images reside and an output directory where to put the PDFs. then press the Create button. I used it to convert 62 directories into 62 PDFs in a about a minute.




This application need Microsofts .NET framework 3.5, if you run into problems, you may need to install it as well. It can be found here


A few other notes:

1) I have only tested it on directories containing jpg files.
2) the pdf file will contain all the images in the directory or sub directory
3) the pdf file will be named the direcotry name (any spaces get converted to underscores for example c:\My WW Articles will be renamed My_WW_Articles.pdf)

Please let me know if you find this useful or have any questions.

Thanks

[Alex Franke]

Nice work, fellow programmer-guy!

What tool did you use for the PDF stitching?

[phi1l]

Another way to address the problem would be with one of the free bulk renaming utilities out there. I use ReNamer 5.50 http://www.den4b.com/projects.php , but there are many more as well.

The PDF solution nice & tidy though.

[JSUPreston]

Any way to get your .Net project files?

[crokett]

I downloaded a copy. Might be useful someday. Now... how quickly can you whip up a util for me to scan a directory tree and move all the files in the subdirectories up to the root directory? I have need of such a utility and could do the research on a perl script but I am feeling lazy.

[Alex Franke]

I downloaded a copy. Might be useful someday. Now... how quickly can you whip up a util for me to scan a directory tree and move all the files in the subdirectories up to the root directory? I have need of such a utility and could do the research on a perl script but I am feeling lazy.

In windows command line, you can do something like this:

for /r %x in (*.*) do move "%x" "c:\my destination directory"

[Hoakie]

Any way to get your .Net project files?

no problem, just note this is personal GIT-R-DONE with rudimentary error handling.

Here is the source code.


Alex, I used the opensource PDFSharp from Source Forge.

[atgcpaul]

no problem, just note this is personal GIT-R-DONE with rudimentary error handling.

Thanks for sharing. When my old boss handed the over the sysadmin and
programming reigns to me, he said to me, "You know, showing another man
your code is like showing him your penis." I still think that's true.

I learned perl by going through all his old code. Could never really pick it up
from a book. How many times can you say Hello, World?

[crokett]

In windows command line, you can do something like this:

Thanks Alex, I will try that. I got an MP3 player for Christmas. Off-brand but it works pretty well except for some reason all the music files have to be in the root music directory on it. So now I have to move several hundred music files out of the subdirectories.

[JSUPreston]

Thanks for the code. I'm not much of a programmer myself, but it looks like something we could use at work. One of our young bucks is gonna peek at it later today.

[Hoakie]

No problem, most of the heavy lifting is comes from the PDFSharp tools. I just added the user interface and directory recursion. Although I haven't used it much, the PDFSharp seems to be a pretty comprehensive PDF writing solution. I'd recommend that he looks at the examples they provide. They have full source available also.

[sparkeyjames]

I learned perl by going through all his old code. Could never really pick it up
from a book. How many times can you say Hello, World?

The answer to that.... more ways than you can count if done in perl.

[sparkeyjames]

Thanks for the code. I'm not much of a programmer myself, but it looks like something we could use at work. One of our young bucks is gonna peek at it later today.

Make sure you don't pollute your closed source App with gpl or other restricted licensed code.

[JSUPreston]

Make sure you don't pollute your closed source App with gpl or other restricted licensed code.

I haven't written a line of code in over two years. Other than the OS and office suite, almost all of our apps are internally written to access out SQL servers. We don't sell or redistribute anything. Even if we wanted to, we can't since we're a "gubment" agency.

[radhak]

That is one super-useful utility you wrote, John! I love it !

I ran it at first without updating my .net and it error-ed out; that .net 3.5 took a long time to download and install, but your program runs great now. I did get an 'out of memory' for one of my folders but I need to go back and check how many pics it had, or if it had any other formats.

I found this really useful to share pics with my parents, as I can now send them just one file instead of a whole bunch of images.

Thanks for the effort, and for sharing!