I was trying to do what the title says, yet I didn’t want to mess with a lot of post processing using gimp and the like.
I have two different A4 scanned pages, that the scanned part doesn’t occupy more than half of each of the A4 pages. In the end I wanted to combine each half in one A4 page.
The end result was an A3 page instead of and A4 page, so this is what I did in order to overcome this issue by using simple scan:
Open simple scan and scan both pages (both A4 and A5 suffice depending on the final result of the orientation of the document).
When both pages are scanned, right click in each one of them and select Crop → A6 and place the rectangle shown on top of the part that you want to keep and merge.
After completing it on both pages, just save the two cropped pages in one document.
Open pdfarranger and add the two cropped page scanned document.
Select both pages by clicking on both of them while holding Ctrl.
Go to 3 parallel lines button → edit → merge pages
Set size of columns and rows to 2 (check on the bottom that the Merged paper size is 210.0 x 297.0 mm)
This is one of those tasks that have multiple possible solutions. I generally use GIMP, unless I want a PDF output, and then I use LibreOffice.
Reading between the lines, I think that you are saying that your scans create PDFs instead of JPG or PNG. Is that right? Dealing with PDFs is always a bit more complicated than dealing with images, so I hardly ever scan directly into a PDF even when I want a PDF as the final result.
yes, the answer is affirmative: I scan almost always to pdfs, since most of the things I want to scan are documents. I saw from gimp some videos using the option “mask”, that combines two images in one, yet I found it much harder than the procedure described above.
In a case like yours, what I’d do is scan the two pages as images, not PDF.
Open the images in GIMP (or your favourite image editor), and crop the excess space. No need for complicated methods such as masks. Save each cropped image separately.
Open LibreOffice Writer, create a new empty document, and add the two images onto the page positioned where you want them. Save the document as a PDF.
As I say, that’s what I do. I hope that this makes sense.
If you want to go the whole hog, if you have the paid version of Adobe, you can load the PDF into Adobe and use its AI to convert the PDF into text, which would improve the quality. There are, of course, other ways of going about this.
Because I find it much faster the way that I do it (due to my familiarity with LibreOffice), and of course if it’s more than one page, then GIMP can’t do what I need.
good to know that there are alternatives and easy ones, especially for a big amount of files. I was stuck due to the fact that the merging options available, were doubling the size of the final document, which was not what I was intending to do.