Go Paperless in Your Home or Office with Gscan2PDF for Linux

I've recently become very frustrated with the stacks of paper cluttering up my home, office and workspace. It's clumsy to wade through when I need a specific piece of information, and I hate keeping up with stuffed file folders. What could I do? I've gone almost completely paperless with the open source Gscan2PDF application for the Linux platform.

Gscan2PDF allows the user to easily scan multiple pages of a document directly into PDF format, with support for rearranging and renumbering pages. In addition, Gscan2PDF has built in digital character recognition, so much of the text in your documents will be searchable. When saving the final product, you can easily attach metadata like title, subject, author, date, and keywords to your PDF for easy finding with an application like Google Desktop Search, Beagle, or Tracker.

The first step you'll need to take to start using Gscan2PDF is to obtain the application. If you're using Ubuntu, a very popular distribution of Linux, then it will be available in the application repositories. For other distributions, see the project home page at http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/.

If your scanner is supported by the Linux operating system, then Gscan2PDF will detect it automatically at startup. You'll see two empty panes in a large window. The leftmost pane displays thumbnail previews of the pages in your document, while the larger right pane displays the current page in full size. Of course, you can pan, zoom in and out, and do basic image manipulation right from there.

To get your first document scanned, click on the scanner icon on the toolbar. A dialog with options will appear. The first option you'll see is designation for how many pages to scan. This is meant for use with scanner than can automatically feed multiple pages, so if you're using a flat-bed scanner, keep the number at "1." You'll still be able to scan in more pages, don't worry! There's also an option for double sided scanning, if your scanner supports it.