Get a Custom Fit with Scan Tailor

So a student came to me asking about how to scan a chapter of a book so she could read it on her phone.  My first thought was, "Sure, we've got scanners--go for it."  Of course, my inner Sisyphus said, "No, no, no.  Let's see if there's a new way to do this--and not use scanners...

I had been using an app called Genius Scan for a while to take photos of receipts, convert to .pdf and save on Google Drive.  This works fine--it's a great app--except for the ads.  So, I went looking for something free and open source, and without ads.  I found Scantailor on Github and decided to give it a try.  Here's the rub on what it is:

Scan Tailor is an interactive tool for post-processing of scanned pages. It gives the ability to cut or crop pages, compensate for skew angle, and add / delete content fields and margins, among others. You begin with raw scans, and end up with tiff's that are ready for printing or assembly in PDF or DjVu file.

Anyway, we tried it. It worked fine, and the student had what she needed. The only major drawback, was that Scantailor doesn't aggregate your scans into a multipage document.  

Pros

- FREE
- Open Source
- Lots of features
- Customizable options
- Easy to use

Cons

- Not updated very often

Summary

Best Fee DIY Book Scanning Post-Processing Software (although that's really not saying much)