scanlib 1.1.0

A multiplatform document scanning library for Python

scanlib

A multiplatform document scanning library for Python with platform-native scanning backends and minimal dependencies.

Features

• Cross-platform — unified API across Windows (WIA 2.0), macOS (ImageCaptureCore), and Linux (SANE)
• Output to PDF — assemble scanned pages into a PDF and control page encoding (JPEG or PNG)
• Minimal dependencies — no external image or PDF processing libraries; JPEG uses platform-native encoders, PNG uses stdlib zlib, PDF assembly uses only the standard library
• Multi-page scanning — automatic document feeder support and flatbed multi-page with a simple callback
• Page-level control — preview, rotate, reorder, and encode individual pages as JPEG or PNG before assembling the final PDF
• Thread-safe — call from any thread; backend threading is handled internally
• Progress & cancellation — monitor scan progress and abort mid-scan via callback

Installation

pip install scanlib

Python 3.9+. Pre-built wheels available for all major platforms. On Linux, libsane and libjpeg-turbo are required at runtime (apt install libsane-dev libturbojpeg0-dev); on other platforms, no additional dependencies are required.

Quick Start

import scanlib

scanners = scanlib.list_scanners()

with scanners[0] as scanner:
    doc = scanner.scan()

with open("output.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(doc.data)

Documentation

Full documentation is available at python-scanlib.readthedocs.io.

About

Created by Angelo Mottola, with the help of Claude Code.

This project was started to fill a void in the Python scanning ecosystem, which I found to be very much fragmented. It is also my first experiment in heavily AI-assisted software development (I still hesitate to use the term "vibe" coding), where I mostly did code review and direction.

License

MIT