# The &kooka; Manual

## Introduction

&kooka; is an application that provides access to scanner hardware using the SANE library. Therefore, the SANE package must be installed to use &kooka;.

&kooka; allows you to scan, save and view in any image format that &Qt; supports.

Character recognition is also provided by using the open source GOCR or OCRAD programs, or the commercial KADMOS library. You have to install at least one of these software packages to use this functionality. After character recognition is complete, a spellcheck is automatically started for the recognized material. You can edit the content in the OCR window and export it as plain text.

## Application Instructions

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

### The &kooka; Main Window

The &kooka; Main Window

Start &kooka; from a console by simply entering ``kooka`` or select it from the Graphics submenu in the application starter. Create a link on the desktop, which uses a scanner icon, if desired.

To use &kooka; only for optical character recognition without connecting to a scanner start the application in gallery mode with ``kooka` `-g``.

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 three tabs, which allow you to switch between the Scan, OCR and the integrated file browser called the Gallery. The working folder is displayed in the upper part of the window along with the folder 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 (⪚, color, gray, or binary), and for gamma values.

  Configure your settings here first. Afterwards, initiate the preview scan with Preview. The scan result will then appear in the right pane.

  Select the area to scan in the preview image itself with the mouse to define the final dimensions.

  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).

  If you checked that you do not want to be 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... Image Saving Always use the Save Assistant

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

## Command Reference and Configuration

### The &kooka; Menubar

#### The File Menu

File New Folder...

- Create a new folder to hold your images in the Kooka Gallery.

&Ctrl;S File Save Image

- Save the image selected underneath the Kooka Gallery to a different folder on your disk.

  See the Save section for details.

&Shift;Del File Delete Folder

- Delete the folder selected underneath the Kooka Gallery.

&Ctrl;N File New Image From Selection

- 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 &kolourpaint; crop tool.

File Unload Image

- Remove the image displayed in the Image Viewer.

&Ctrl;P File Print

- Prints the displayed image.

&Ctrl;Q File Quit

- Quit &kooka;.

#### The Scan Menu

Scan OCR Image...

- Start the optical character recognition (OCR) of the whole image using the recognition system defined on the OCR page in the settings dialog. This starts the character recognition for the preview image.

Scan OCR Selection...

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

#### The Image Menu

The actions in this menu are also available in the context menu of the preview window.

&Ctrl;I Image Scale to Width

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

&Ctrl;H Image Scale to Height

- Proportionately scales the image to the height of the display.

&Ctrl;1 Image Original Size

- 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.

&Ctrl;V Image Mirror Vertically

- Flip image vertically.

&Ctrl;M Image Mirror Horizontally

- Flip image horizontally.

&Ctrl;7 Image Rotate Counter-Clockwise

- Rotate the image ninety degrees counterclockwise.

&Ctrl;9 Image Rotate Clockwise

- Rotate the image ninety degrees clockwise.

&Ctrl;8 Image Rotate image 180 degrees

- Rotates image 180 degrees.

#### The Settings Menu

Apart from the common &kde; Settings and Help menus described in the Menu chapter of the &kde; Fundamentals documentation &kooka; has these application specific menu entries:

Settings Select Scan Device...

- If you have several scanners use this action to select a scanner and use a certain device always at startup.

Settings Add Scan Device...

- Add a device which is not automatically detected at startup of &kooka;.

### Configuring Kooka

General

- Use the button in this section to reenable all messages and questions hidden by using Don't ask me again.

Startup

- You may want to uncheck Show the scanner selection dialog , if you have only one scanner. If you have only one computer you may also want to uncheck Query network for available scanners.

Image Saving

- Always use the Save Assistant Ask for filename when saving Before the scan starts / After the scan is finished.

Gallery & Thumbnails

- Here the size of the thumbnails can be adjusted; as well as the background. For example, you might want to reduce the size of the thumbnails if you are scanning many pages from a book.

  In the section Image Gallery select how and where to show the recent folders.

OCR

- Select the OCR engine and the path to the executable.

## Save

More on Saving Images

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 folder `~/Documents/KookaGallery`. In the window, your current subfolder 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 `KookaGallery`. Create subfolders 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, use Rename Image and 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 `~/Documents/KookaGallery/`, you can, of course, save them to another location. To do this, right click the image name and select Save Image. Choose any path here. In addition, close or permanently delete images here.

To incorporate other images in the gallery, use File Import Image or add them by dragging and dropping. Open the filemanager to the folder containing the desired images. Then add them to the &kooka; gallery by dragging them and dropping them into the gallery.

## 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 be recognized in the preview window. Then, do your final scan in binary mode with Scan.

Now click the icon in the toolbar, OCR Selection, or select this item in the Scan 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 OCR. You will now see a window containing the OCR results. The quality depends heavily on that of the document itself.

The gocr Window

After character recognition is complete, start a spellcheck for the recognized material. You can edit the content in the OCR window and export it as plain text.

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 toolbar, click the icon or click in the menu on OCR Selection. Now proceed as described in the previous section.

The Results of the OCR

## Credits and License

&kooka;

Copyright for the application 2000-2010, the &kooka; developers and contributors

Copyright for the documentation 2002 Martin Sommer msommer@suse.de

&underFDL; &underGPL;