[SOLVED] Problems Creating a TIFF

[wash3393]

I scanned a book with xsane into ~500 PNM files, now I need to turn these files into one multi page TIFF so I can send it over to scantailor but I've run into some issues.

I scanned the first half of the book (250 pages/PNM files) and took a break, every other page I scanned was upside down (because that's how I scanned them in) so I used Image Magick to rotate these pages 180 degrees. Now going back to work on the second half of the book, I opened my project but now xsane can't handle those edited files. I found this post which sounds like what happened to me but this doesn't solve my problem. So I just started a new project in xsane and saved the other half of the book (250 files) into a different folder.

Now I've got these 2 folders which I can't just merge because one folder has a file named image-0001.pnm for page 1 and the other folder has a file named image-0001.pnm for page 251. I tried using the rename function from the command line to edit the file names in mass but it didn't work, after experimenting with it for awhile and not having any luck I gave up. I know Image Magick can turn PNM's into a multi page TIFF, I've done this before, but I haven't seen anything saying it could do so with files from multiple folders like this. I'm hoping someone here can suggest something that doesn't involve individually renaming over 200 files. Is there perhaps a way to merge two multipage TIFF's and not have the pages get out of order? Hopefully all of that made sense.

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by wash3393

Now I've got these 2 folders which I can't just merge because one folder has a file named image-0001.pnm for page 1 and the other folder has a file named image-0001.pnm for page 251.
...
I'm hoping someone here can suggest something that doesn't involve individually renaming over 200 files.

You don't have to rename the files manually; a for loop in bash can do it. Just open a terminal window and cd to the directory containing the pnm files for pages 251 and above, then do this:

for x in $(/bin/ls -r *.pnm)
do
   num=${x#image-}
   num=${num%.pnm}
   num=$(echo $num | sed 's/^0*//')
   num=$((num + 250))
   /bin/mv $x image-$(printf "%04d" $num).pnm
done

That will rename image-0001.pnm, image-0002.pnm, image-0003.pnm, ..., to image-0251.pnm, image-0252.pnm, image-0253.pnm, ... . You could then put those in the directory containing the real image-0001.pnm, image-0002.pnm, image-0003.pnm, ... , and then use ImageMagick to merge them all.

[wash3393]

Excellent! This was exactly what I needed , much appreciated.