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Documentation: Kooka Manual

by Martin Sommer (msommer@suse.de)

Developer: Klaas Freitag

Revision 0.33.00

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Kooka is a very useful KDE scanning application.

Introduction
Application Instructions
The Kooka Main Window
Settings
Save
Character Recognition
Credits and License
Installation

Chapter 1. Introduction

Kooka is a KDE application that enables easy scanning using SANE libraries. Therefore,SANE the package must be installed to use Kooka. Clear and concise use was the focus of its development.

Character recognition is also provided by the built-in text recognition program gocr. Install gocr to use this functionality. After character recognition is complete, the recognized material can be opened in the text editor Kate with just one click, where you can edit the contents.

Chapter 2. Application Instructions

The web site http://www.mostang.com/sane has information about supported scanners. Refer to it before purchasing a scanner, if possible.

The Kooka Main Window

Start Kooka from a console by simply entering kooka. Create a link on the KDE desktop, which uses a scanner icon, if desired.

The main window in Kooka consists of three frames. At the top, see both icon and a menu panels. Use the mouse to enlarge or reduce the windows as needed.

The navigation window consists of two tabs, which allow you to switch between the Preview and the integrated file browser called the Gallery. The working directory is displayed in the lower part of the window along with the directory where the scan will be saved.

Make your scanner-dependent settings, which are dependent on the scanner you have connected, in the lower left window. Usually, these are settings for resolution, brightness and contrast, scanning mode (e.g., color, gray, or binary), and for gamma values.

Configure your settings here first. Afterwards, initiate the preview scan with Preview. If the Preview tab in the upper window is selected, see the results there.

Select the various formats in the preview image itself to define the final dimensions. The User setting is recommended for this, so you select the area to scan in the preview display with the mouse.

After this is done, click Scan to scan the selection made in the preview. After scanning, you will be asked in which format to save the image whether to make this your standard format (without being prompted to confirm your selection in the future).

Note

If you checked that you do not want to asked about the save format, the memory assistant will no longer appear. To change the format some time in the future, select Settings->Configure Kooka...->Save Image->Always show memory assistant

The large window shows how the image appears after a final scan.

Chapter 3

The icons in the panel have been returned to the menu panel, except for the printer icon, under Image settings. The print option can be found under File. Each menu item in the image settings is briefly described below.

ImageCanvas->Open image in graphic application (Ctrl+G)

Enter a graphics application for opening your scanned image directly. Recommended applications include The GIMP.

ImageCanvas->OCR image... (Ctrl+O)

Start the window for optical character recognition (OCR). If you have gocr installed, then the path to it should be in the path line. This starts the character recognition for the preview image or for the highlighted area.

ImageCanvas->OCR on selection... (Ctrl+C)

A window will reappear for the character recognition. Here, however, the character recognition is only for the area highlighted in the final scan.

ImageCanvas->Scale to Width (Ctrl+I)

This proportionally scales the image in the large canvas to the width of the display.

ImageCanvas->Scale to Height (Ctrl+H)

Proportionately scales the image to the height of the display.

ImageCanvas->Original Size (Ctrl+S)

Restores the original scan size by reducing or enlarging the image in the display.

There are additional methods of scaling an image: right click the image display. Redefine the three named options and set the enlargement itself. This can also be done in the Preview window.

ImageCanvas->Create from selection (Ctrl+N)

If the scanned image includes more than you want to appear in the final image, use this tool to crop your image by marking your selection in the larger image display to the right then selecting this tool. The image is cropped according to your selection. You may already be familiar with this function from The GIMP crop tool.

ImageScan->Mirror image vertically (Ctrl+V)

Flip image vertically.

ImageScan->Mirror image horizontally (Ctrl+M)

Flip image horizontally.

ImageScan->Mirror both directions (Ctrl+B)

Flip image both horizontally and vertically.

ImageScan->Rotate image clockwise (Ctrl+R)

Rotate the image ninety degrees clockwise.

ImageScan->Rotate image counter-clockwise (Ctrl+W)

Rotate the image ninety degrees counterclockwise.

ImageScan->Rotate image 180 degrees (Ctrl+D)

Rotates image 180 degrees.

Chapter 4. Save

The method for saving an image is somewhat different in Kooka than in many other applications. Click the Gallery tab to open a small file browser. This is the directory ~/.kde/share/apps/ScanImages/ In the lower portion of the window, your current subdirectory in the gallery is shown. This is where all scanned images are first saved as files. When starting Kooka for the first time, you will only see the ScanImages. Create subdirectories by right clicking this folder. The selected folder, highlighted in blue, is the first save location of the scanned images. The scans are labeled in ascending numerical order as in kscan_0001 and kscan_0002.

To save an image permanently, left click the name. Next, give a new name and the appropriate ending for the image format chosen when scanning. If you enter a different extension, you will get a message that it does not correspond to the scanned format. Although you can still save the image under this name, it will retain its original format. At present, 'On-the-fly' conversion is not offered.

If you do not want to use this method of managing your images in ~/.kde/share/apps/ScanImages/, you can, of course, save them to another location. To do this, right click the image name and select Save. Choose any path here. In addition, close or permanently delete images here.

To incorporate other images in the gallery, add them in Konqueror by dragging and dropping. Open Konqueror to the directory containing the desired images. Then add them to the Kooka gallery by dragging them and dropping them into the gallery.

Chapter 5. Character Recognition

As already mentioned, the gocr must be installed. Scan a preview of your document in grayscale or color. You can only scan in binary mode if you have a pure white sheet of paper with black print. Next, highlight the text to have recognized in the preview window. Then, do your final scan in binary mode with Scan.

Now click the second icon from the left in the icon panel, Character recognition for image..., or select this item in the Image settings menu. For your first try, do not change the default settings shown in the emerging OCR window. These are usually appropriate and meet most needs. Now click Start character recognition. You will now see a window containing the OCR results. The quality depends heavily on that of the document itself.

The text can now be opened by clicking the button with the Kate editor. After the final scan, mark a selection in the image display to the right to load just a part of the text or image to the OCR. Next, in the icon panel, click the third button from the right or click in the menu on OCR on selection. Now proceed as described in the previous section.

Chapter 6. Credits and License

This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Chapter 7. Installation

Kooka is part of the KDE project http://www.kde.org/.

Kooka can be found in the kdegraphics package on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main FTP site of the KDE project.

In order to compile and install Kooka on your system, type the following in the base directory of the Kooka distribution:

% ./configure
% make
% make install

Since Kooka uses autoconf and automake you should have no trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the KDE mailing lists.