I was going to buy a document scanner to start scanning all of the receipts I generate through my business, but instead I was thinking of just using my phone. Some of the documents have been wrinkled, so I was considering using Lexan or something similar to help flatten them for taking pictures. I am worried about a glare, however. Do any of you have recommendations or suggestions?
don't use your in-camera/phone flash, use a light-source at a 45° angle from the surface.
try and minimise light hitting your phone/hand and also whatever is behind you.
also polycarbonate is 3x the price of acrylic and for this purpose you wouldn't notice a difference.
>>998070
Use an iron. Put the paper on a flat surface, as flat as you can get it to stay. Put a towel over it, and iron the towel on low heat. Let it cool, and take the photo.
>>998075
Many receipts are made through xerography, i.e. with heat. Wont ironing them turn them black and thus ruin them?
>>998070
photographing documents to a standard that can be ocr'd is a pain in the dick, mostly because of the lighting. stick with the flatbed/sheetfeed combination scanner.
ten years ago you could pick up a used ricoh is450d and adaptec 2940uw card for two hundred bux. i don't know what the modern equivalent is, maybe fuji 5750?
protip: don't fall for the kofax meme. their product was relevant in 1990 when computers genuinely needed a hardware accelerator to perform basic crop/deskew/denoise/level/bit depth reduction as data came off the scanner, but now they're just patent trolls.
>>998081
yes. it's called thermal printing.
it will also transfer toner. a common method of etching circuitboards is to transfer toner from printed sheets using an iron onto the copper substrate.
A much simpler thing you should do, is make an automated script which either eases turning the document into black and white (adjusting the threshold) or at least uses some standard value. It's a pain that every scanner has different bullshit and shit settings. Even the "grayscale" option from Windows uses indexed colors, which have to be changed to color or black and white before Gimp will all you to do black and white threshold. Do this for a dozen documents and you're wasting a lot of time and patience.
>>998070
I'd make something like a screen printing setup where there is a piece of plastic in a frame that can be lowered onto a flat surface with the thing to be "scanned"
or just simply use a flatbed scanner with a hotkey setup to automatically scan and save; it goes fast
Get Microsoft's Office Lens app. It's available on all 3 phone OS. Best document scanning app I've ever used.
>>998070
>glare
Just disable flash and make photos under in sunlight.
Side light is uneven, several well-placed lamps are needed to get uniform brightness.
Check unpaper for processing photos:
https://www.flameeyes.eu/projects/unpaper
the people behind the huge internet archive web site have scanned millions of books. they sell a complete system, and they also made the plans freely available.
>>998206
This will flatten creased receipts for you. It's magic
I reckon plexiglass will work too, or a glass pane
