Getting Started with ScanTailor Advanced: Your First Project, End to End

What ScanTailor Advanced Does — and What It Deliberately Does Not Do

ScanTailor Advanced is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. You give it raw scans; it splits spreads into pages, straightens them, finds the text block, rebuilds uniform margins, flattens page curl, and renders clean output images ready to be printed or assembled into a PDF or DjVu file.

The official project description is explicit about the boundaries, and believing them will save you real confusion:

• It does not scan. It never talks to your scanner or camera. Capture happens before ScanTailor, with whatever device and settings you choose — see our hardware and capture guide and the scanning DPI guide.
• It does not OCR. There is no text recognition in the pipeline. ScanTailor prepares pages so that a separate OCR tool does a better job afterwards.
• It does not assemble multi-page documents. Its output is a folder of page images (TIFF). Turning those into a finished PDF or DjVu is a separate step in separate software.

Everything in this guide sits inside those boundaries: image in, better image out.

Before You Start: Prepare the Scans

ScanTailor cannot rescue a bad capture, so spend two minutes on the input:

• One folder per book or document, containing only that item’s page images, in reading order.
• Scan in grayscale or colour — never in black-and-white mode. A “line art” scan has already thrown away the grey information the binarization stage needs to make its own decisions.
• Resolution: 300 DPI for ordinary text, 600 DPI for small print or fine detail. The project wiki’s scanning guidance is blunt: don’t scan below 300 DPI. The DPI guide explains the trade-offs.
• TIFF if you can (lossless, LZW compression is fine). PNG is the lossless fallback. Avoid JPEG for scanner output — it is lossy, and no later step can restore what it discarded. Camera shooters should use the highest quality JPEG setting available.
• Turn off your scanner software’s “enhancements” — no auto-deskew, no auto-crop, no “document mode” clean-up. Raw and boring is exactly what the pipeline wants, because every correction is about to be done properly, once, inside the project.

Step 1: Create the Project

Launch ScanTailor Advanced and choose New Project. Point it at the folder holding your scans and select the images to include. Then choose the output folder: by default the program appends an out directory next to your input folder, which is a sensible arrangement — originals on one side, processed pages on the other — but you can pick any location.

Next you are asked for the DPI of the source images. Set it for all pages at once, and set it truthfully: these values describe the physical size of your pages, and later stages — page size and output resolution — are computed from them. If your scanner saved correct DPI metadata, the defaults will already be right. For camera photos there is no scanner DPI; the project’s own guidance is to measure the physical width of the photographed area and divide the pixel count by it. Our DPI guide walks through why this matters.

Step 2: Walk the Six Stages in Order

The left-hand stage list is the whole method. Stages are numbered and are meant to be visited in order, because each one consumes the previous stage’s result:

1. Fix Orientation — rotate sideways or upside-down scans upright in 90° steps. This one is manual by design: the program does not guess which way up your page is. Covered with Split Pages →
2. Split Pages — tell the program whether each scan is one page, one page plus a sliver of the next, or a two-page spread, and where the dividing line falls. Guide →
3. Deskew — rotate each page by the small angle that makes its text lines truly horizontal, including the oblique correction for physically tilted pages added in v1.1.1. Guide →
4. Select Content — draw the box around the useful content of each page: text block, page numbers, illustrations — and nothing else. Guide →
5. Page Layout — add uniform margins around that content and bring every page to a common size, so the book reads evenly. Guide →
6. Output — render the finished pages: dewarping, colour mode (black-and-white, grayscale/colour, or mixed), binarization, and TIFF files written to your output folder. Dewarping → · Binarization →

Two mechanics apply at almost every stage. First, each stage can be run across the whole project with the stage’s batch (play) button instead of page by page. Second, most settings offer an “Apply to…” dialog — this page, all pages, this page and the following ones, every other page, or a selected range — which is how a correction you make on one representative page becomes a rule for the book. The batch processing guide is devoted to working this way.

Step 3: Inspect Before You Commit

Automatic stages are good, not perfect. Before running Output, click through the thumbnails at the Select Content and Page Layout stages and look for the classic failures: a content box that clipped a page number, a spread split at the wrong line, a page whose skew stands out. ScanTailor Advanced helps you hunt these down: pages that disagree with the rest are flagged by the deviation feature (pages with unusually high skew, odd content sizes, or non-matching layouts are highlighted), and thumbnails can be sorted by properties such as width and height so outliers line up at one end of the list.

Fix problems at the stage that caused them, not later. A clipped page number is a Select Content fix; a crooked page is a Deskew fix. Settings changed on one page can be re-applied to its neighbours from the same stage’s Apply to dialog.

Step 4: Run Output and Check the Result

At the Output stage, choose the mode per the material — black-and-white for plain text (the default), mixed for pages combining text with photographs or halftones, colour/grayscale when the page itself is the artefact — and let the batch run. Finished pages land as TIFF files in your output folder. The default output resolution is 600 DPI (300 in some configurations); leave it matched to your project unless you have a specific reason to change it.

Then do the least glamorous and most important thing in this whole guide: open a sample of the output files and look at them — the first page, a middle page, a page with an illustration, the last page. Zoom in. Check that no text is clipped, that thin letters survived binarization, and that pages are uniformly sized. Only then is the book ready for the steps ScanTailor does not do: OCR and assembly into PDF or DjVu with your tool of choice.

Next: Fix Orientation & Split Pages All Tutorials

Frequently Asked Questions

Does ScanTailor Advanced include OCR or make PDFs?

No. Per the official project description, scanning, optical character recognition, and assembling multi-page documents are all out of scope. ScanTailor Advanced outputs cleaned page images (TIFF); run OCR and PDF or DjVu assembly afterwards in separate tools, which will work noticeably better on cleaned pages than on raw scans.

What order should I work through a project?

Always the stage order: Fix Orientation, Split Pages, Deskew, Select Content, Page Layout, then Output. Each stage builds on the previous one, and Output will not even unlock until every page has passed Select Content and Page Layout, because final page sizes depend on all pages together.

What scans should I feed it?

Grayscale or colour scans at 300 DPI (600 for small print), saved as TIFF where possible, with your scanner software’s automatic enhancements switched off. Never scan in black-and-white mode and avoid JPEG for scanner output: both discard information the pipeline needs. Full reasoning is in our scanning DPI guide.