That should work:
row = row[:len(row)-1]
Otherwise the first col gets lost.

- adding Format to the scanimage batch option (–batch=out%02d.tif)
- compress with zip when called tiff2pdf
- added ImageMagick Image enhancement (little more contrast) and two-bit Tiff (scans in Gray and reduces colors to 4)

Scanning in Gray have no decrease in speed on my HP 5590.
I’ve also added Posibility to scan more than one dokument (page sequence) with the ADF.
When you have onle one page to scan, its faster not to use the ADF.

So you can call scan2pdf:
scan2pdf myDocument -> scans one page, without the adf (saved as myDocument.pdf)
scan2pdf 99 myDocument -> uses ADF to scan into myDocument.pdf
scan2pdf 3,8,2 myDocument -> uses ADF and scans 3 page sequences, files are saved to myDocument.01.pdf (3 pages), myDocument.02.pdf (8 pages) und myDocument.03.pdf (2 pages)

Maybe someone like it:
[code]

#!/bin/sh

SOURCE=""

if [ $# -gt 1 ]
then

SOURCE="--source ADF -l 3"
outname=$2
pbreak=$1

echo "$pbreak" | egrep "[^0-9,]+"
if [ $? -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Check Sequnence List !"
exit 1
fi
else

pbreak=99
outname=$1
SOURCE="--batch-count=1"

fi

startdir=$(pwd)
tmpdir=scan-$RANDOM

cd /tmp
mkdir $tmpdir
cd $tmpdir
echo "################## Scanning ###################"
scanimage -x 210 -y 297 --batch=out%02d.tif --format=tiff --mode Gray --resolution 300 $SOURCE

start=1
cnt=1
sc=$(echo "$pbreak" | cut -d"," -f1-99 --output-delimiter=" " | wc -w)
for pb in $(echo "$pbreak" | cut -d "," -f1-99 --output-delimiter=" ")
do
ende=$(expr $start + $pb - 1)
pnr=0
i=1
echo "############ Page-Sequence ($cnt), Pages: $pb, Start: $start, End: $ende ############"
tpages=""
for page in $(ls out*.tif); do
pnr=$(expr $pnr + 1)
if [ $pnr -ge $start -a $pnr -le $ende ]
then
echo "... Converting"
# increase contrast and reduce colordepth
convert $page -level 15%,85% -depth 2 "b$page"
echo "... OCRing"
tpages="$tpages b$page"
i=$(expr $i + 1)
echo -n " "
tesseract $page $page -l deu
if [ $sc -gt 1 ]
then
cnts=`printf %02d $cnt`
cat $page.txt >> $outname.$cnts.txt
else
cat $page.txt >> $outname.txt
fi

fi
done

echo "... Converting to PDF"
#Use tiffcp to combine output tiffs to a single mult-page tiff
tiffcp $tpages output.tif
#Convert the tiff to PDF
if [ $sc -gt 1 ]
then
cnts=`printf %02d $cnt`
tiff2pdf -z output.tif > $startdir/$outname.$cnts.pdf
mv $outname.$cnts.txt $startdir
else
tiff2pdf -z output.tif > $startdir/$outname.pdf
mv $outname.txt $startdir
fi

start=$(expr $start + $pb)
cnt=$(expr $cnt + 1)

done

cd ..
echo "################ Cleaning Up ################"
rm -rf $tmpdir
cd $startdir

[/code]

b) tesseract installs also country dependant resources. In my Ubuntu 9.04 (english US) it install by default the German files. Go and install a compatible country. I also installed tesseract-ocr-eng

c) on the last step of your program, I couldn’t resolv tiffcp and tiff2pdf. Fixed by installing the package libtiff-tools

Albeit this note is somehow long I want to state that your solution is very simple and effective. Again, my compliments, I encourage everyone to adopt your solution, It took my five minutes and three tries to be up and running

Still, I have to discover how to scan a double sided document. I’m investigating the command scanimage. I’ll post again if I discover how it should be accomplished
Cheers Elio