• FairScan 2.0 released

    From LWN.net@618:250/24 to All on Thu Jun 18 06:42:22 2026

    Version
    2.0 of the FairScan document-scanning app for Android has been
    released. The headline feature for this release is the addition of optical-character-recognition (OCR) support using Tesseract to produce PDFs with searchable text from scans. FairScan developer Pierre-Yves
    Nicolas has written a detailed
    blog about adding the feature and explaining why it had not been added previously.

    That looks nice, so why didn't FairScan have it before? That's
    because FairScan wasn't ready for it: I wouldn't be comfortable if
    FairScan was giving you wrong text half of the time. To get good
    results from an OCR engine, you need to provide it a readable
    image. If it's hard to read for a human, it's certainly also hard to
    read for an OCR engine.

    Over the past year, I worked on different parts of FairScan's
    automatic processing to transform photos of documents into PDFs that
    are easy for humans to read:

    document detection
    perspective correction
    shadow reduction
    brightness and contrast enhancement

    All this work on image processing helped FairScan produce clean
    PDFs and can now also contribute to making text recognition effective.

    FairScan is available via Google
    P;ay or F-Droid.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1078242/
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