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I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion
but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:
- Scans using the Windows Image Acquisition APIs via COM
- Runs OCR on the image using Microsoft Office Document Imaging via COM (which may already be on your PC if you have Office installed)
- Converts the image to JPEG using .NET Image APIs
- Stores the OCR text into the EXIF comment field using
.NET Image APIs (which means Windows Search can index the image by the text in the image)
- Moves the image to the public share
Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:
param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)
$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";
[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))
$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();
foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
$fileIdx = 0;
while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
[void](++$fileIdx);
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }
$image = $item.Transfer();
$fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
$image.SaveFile($fileName);
clear-variable image
if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }
$modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
$modiDocument.Create($fileName);
$modiDocument.OCR();
if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
$ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }
$newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
$fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName
$fileName = $newFileName
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }
$property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
$property.Id = 40092;
$property.Type = 1;
$property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
$property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
$fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
$fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
}
}
else {
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }
if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
. $fileName;
}
else {
$result = dir $fileName;
$result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
$result
}
}
I ran into a few issues:
- MODI doesn't seem to be in the Office 2010 Technical Preview I installed first. Installing Office 2007 fixed that.
- The MODI.Document class, at least via PowerShell, can't be instantiated in a 64bit environment. To run the script on my 64bit OS I had to start powershell from the 32bit cmd.exe
(C:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe).
- I was planning to hook up my script to the scanner's 'Scan' button, but
HP didn't get the button working for their Vista driver. Their workaround is "don't do that!".
- You must call Image.Dispose() to get .NET to release its reference to the corresponding image file.
- In trying to figure out how to store the text in the files comment, I ran into a dead-end trying to find the corresponding setter for GetDetailsOf which folks like James O'Neil use in PowerShell for interesting ends.
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