scantopl VS scanservjs

My solution to use my workforce with paperless is scanservjs and scantopl and I'm pretty happy with it

I use scanservjs and scantopl on docker.

Nice. A alternative worth mentioning is scantopl

My solution to use my workforce with paperless is scanservjs and scantopl and I'm pretty happy with it

I use scanservjs and scantopl on docker.

Recently I stumbled upon ScanServerJs, an awesome software that allows you to setup your own scan server.

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)

Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.

However, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.

The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.

It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.

We currently have an HP M1136 MFP connected to CUPS on the local network. It always turns itself off and is never available. People have mostly resorted to walking over with their laptop and connecting via USB. Also there are no good network interfaces to the scanner. We use https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs to control the scanner but it's too buggy and slow.

I've had an old all-in-one HP USB printer/scanner hooked up to a Raspberry Pi for a few years running CUPS. Network printing has been great via this method. But the scanner portion has sat unused ever since. Until, now.... WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT SCANSERVER-JS?! My word this is incredible! It does for scanning what CUPS does for printing, and with a beautiful Web UI.