Automatic crop and rotate scans?

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

"Nadav Har'El" <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> writes:

> I have a flatbed scanner (by HP) attached to my Linux machine, and I
> often need to scan rectangular items such as photographs, CD
> inserts, and the occasional piece of paper.
>
> At the moment, I follow a tedious manual process to do that: The
> scanner generates a big image of everything it sees on glass window,
> and then using Gimp I manually rotate the image (because I can't
> place it on the window with 100% precision) and then crop it to the
> rectangle.
>
> Supposedly, Photoshop has an "Automate->Crop and Straighten Photos"
> feature (see
> http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/crop-straighten/)
> but I couldn't find such a feature in Gimp.

Hmm... It seems that the feature that is missing is rotation by an
abitrary angle. However, from your description I can't see why you
would ever need that - you say your originals are rectangular, and it
should be easy to place them aligned with the sides of the scanner
surface, in the corner, shouldn't it?

I also have an HP scanner/printer/fax attached to my computer. My
procedure is really dumb: I just put the original rectangular piece of
paper on the scanner (in a corner is perfectly fine), click on the KDE
launcher button, type "scan" in the search field to get several
options, and choose "Scanner Tool" (I believe it is xsane). The
preview window allows you to easily restrict the field to what you
need and rotate by right angles (if you oriented the original
incorrectly).

I never encontered a situation in which this would be
insufficient. What am I missing?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org