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@PeterJRiches
Last active April 8, 2025 05:22
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Want to scan arbitrary-length paper, rather than pages, in an optical scanner

Want to scan arbitrary-length paper, rather than pages

I have code listings from old projects on rolls of paper, or fanfold stacks of paper. Either way, the paper is continuous, not split into pages. (My projects predated page-printers! The old printers took continuous feedstock.)

I want to scan (and ideally use OCR to extract text from) my old listings.

To date, I haven't found any open source projects to make a scanner with a sheet-feeder continue to scan after the end of what it deems a page. Essentially, it needs to scan a super-long page, until it runs out of paper, without knowing in advance how long that page is going to be.

Other than the obvious control issue, there could be an issue with buffering a large amount of data in a machine designed to buffer limited page sizes: I don't know if it is possible to stream the scanned data to the computer, but that would be a good workaround.

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