Skerge

I have an HP printer/scanner at home that my wife and I use surprisingly often, certainly more often than we might think. For the most part it works just fine and it gets the job done, but I do have a couple of complaints about it. One of the bigger ones is that when scanning multiple pages of a single document, I get one PDF per page and have no way of simply scanning in multiple pages to a single file. I also have to use some ugly web interface that’s not very accessible from my phone. In order to solve these problems, I made a small Android app that would allow me to scan multiple pages and then share them as a single PDF. Most of the time I want the scanned documents on my phone anyways so that I can send them to someone via email or WhatsApp so it works out quite nicely. I’ve tentatively called it Skerge (scan + merge + a "K" for Kotlin). Here are some screenshots of the app in action:

The main view of Skerge upon opening the app

Upon opening the app, you’re presented with a simple view with instructions on how to use the app.

A a pending scan in progress

Once you tap the “+” button, the app requests a scan from the printer, and waits for it to complete.

A preview of the scanned document

When the scan is complete, a preview of the scanned image is displayed.

A second page of the document scan in progress

You can repeat the process multiple times to scan in additional pages.

Sharing the scanned document

When you’re finished scanning, you can tap the share button to merge the PDFs from the scanner into a single file and send to your app of choice.

There are still some issues and things to polish but for now at least it’s working and making it much easier for me to scan documents and send them off.

Additional Notes