Scan2Form 🖨️ -> 🌐

Scan documents from a physical scanner directly into your web form.

Typically, browsers can't access scanners. Scan2Form solves this by running a tiny local bridge on your computer.

🚀 Quick Start for Developers

1. Install the package

npm install scan2form

2. Add to your frontend code

import { Scan2Form } from 'scan2form';

const scanner = new Scan2Form();

// Triggers the scan and populates the input with the scanned file.
await scanner.scanToInput('my-input');

🛠️ Handling Previews

Since scanToInput returns the file object, you can easily display a preview yourself:

const result = await scanner.scanToInput('my-input');
if (result.success) {
    const url = URL.createObjectURL(result.file);
    document.getElementById('my-preview-iframe').src = url;
}

That's it! The file input is now populated with the scanned document, just as if the user uploaded it manually.

🖥️ Setup

To make scanning work, you need two things installed on your computer:

1. The Scanner Engine

We rely on a local scanning engine. You can use either NAPS2 (Recommended for Windows) or SANE (Recommended for macOS/Linux).

Option A: NAPS2 (Windows)

• Download NAPS2 and install it.

• Important: Ensure naps2.console is available in your system PATH.

• How to configure NAPS2 Command Line

  Tip (Windows PowerShell): You can set up an alias to make it simple:

  function naps2.console { . "C:\Program Files\NAPS2\NAPS2.Console.exe" $args }

Option B: SANE (macOS / Linux)

• macOS: Install via Homebrew: brew install sane-backends
• Linux: Install via apt: sudo apt-get install sane-utils
• Verify installation by running scanimage --version in your terminal.

2. The Bridge Server

This tiny server listens for commands from your website.

# Run this command in your terminal
npx scan2form-server

• Keep this running while scanning.
• It runs locally at http://127.0.0.1:3000.

Alternative: We've included shortcut scripts in the package. If you have the files locally:

• Windows: Double-click start-server.bat
• Mac/Linux: Run ./start-server.sh

🛠️ System Requirements

• Node.js: v16+
• OS: Windows, Mac, or Linux
• Scanner: Any scanner supported by your OS drivers.