Tailpiece: Improving a scanned text page

Scanning a text page is never easy with Simple Scan, especially with old documents. Using the text mode, some folds show up as lines. If the text is faded or shaded, parts of the characters go missing. While the visual result of scanning in photo mode is much better, a printout normally has a distracting gray background and readability suffers in the process.

A solution is to use the ‘white-threshold’ option in Imagemagick's Convert command line utility after scanning a text document as a photo, as shown below: