CamScanner alternatives

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Each opens with the prompt loaded and waiting — nothing is sent until you press enter. It is copied at the same time, in case the app is not installed.

Build me a local document scanner I own, to replace CamScanner.

- A CLI plus a small local page: Python, FastAPI and OpenCV, data in a SQLite file next to it.
- Find the page edges with OpenCV: greyscale, blur, Canny, largest four-sided contour, with four draggable corners for when it guesses wrong.
- Warp that quadrilateral front-on with getPerspectiveTransform, then crop and rotate.
- Filters as named pipelines: colour enhance, greyscale, and adaptive thresholding for black and white, so a dim room does not come out solid black.
- Model it properly: documents, and a page row holding the original's path, its four corners, its filter and its order. Every scan re-renders from the untouched original.
- OCR each page with Tesseract locally, store the text, and index it with FTS5 so every scan is searchable. Good on a flat page, poor on a curled receipt.
- Export to PDF with img2pdf, the recognised text as an invisible layer.
- One command to import a folder of photos as a document, one to back up the database and originals.
- Binds to localhost only. No accounts, no telemetry, no network calls at all.
- Skip: cloud sync, share links and team folders. That is storage somebody pays for every month.
- Include a README with setup, installing Tesseract, and where the scans live.

## Look and feel

CamScanner's own, and the first thing to get right is that it is teal, not green. One teal, and it carries the camera button, the tool icons and anything active. Everything else is black on white with grey for meta.

It also does not open on a camera. It opens on a file manager with a launcher above it:

- A grey search pill across the top with a small filter control at its right end.
- A grid of tools, four across, each a rounded-square icon in a circle of pale ground with its name underneath — PDF Tools, ID Cards, Extract Text, Import Images, Import Files, All. A small red NEW flag sits on the corner of anything recent.
- A **Recents** heading with a quiet "View All ›" opposite it, then documents as rows: a thumbnail of the page on the left, the file name, and the date and page count under it in grey.

The bottom bar has five slots — Home, Files, the camera, Tools, Me — and the camera is a filled teal circle raised proud of the bar, not an icon sitting inside it.

The scan screen is the other half: the page preview takes almost everything, corner handles on the detected edges in teal, and the filter choices as a row of small labelled thumbnails along the bottom.

Generous spacing, clear hierarchy, big tap targets, phone-readable type, system font. Keep the text dark enough to read at a glance: the softness of a palette belongs to the shapes and the fills, never to the words. Nothing I need to read — dates, numbers, labels — in pale grey on white.

Keep it all on my device: no accounts, no sign-in, nothing sent anywhere. Save my data so it is there next time I open it.