Digested

I have an itch. I need to get hundreds of pieces of paper to my bookkeeper who happens to be on the other side of the country. And as usual, when poking an itch things happen in interesting ways, opening up possibilities. So start with Python, PyQt and the KDE python bindings. The plan was to write some kind of bulk scanning application, with the ability to annotate notes to the scans, bundle them up in a pdf, and send them off by email. Some issues that I ran across. The python-imaging-scan module is quite flakey. Repeated scans would lead to crashes. I encapsulated it within a subprocess, which seems to prevent bringing the whole application down, and somehow allows it to do it's thing each time reasonably reliably. Still has issues however. The python-keyring-kde works nicely. Very simple to use, and it works. I use it to keep the password needed to login to send emails. The python-imaging is very nice. I clip the images to remove whitespace around it, and it is very easy. To create a QImage is trivial using the QtImage module. The reportlab pdf creation module is very nice. Once you get your mind around the structure, which is much easier than the documentation seems to portray, it is very easy to create a simple pdf. The code is at code.google.com. There are doubtless many bugs, and I have only done testing with the scanner that I have.