Flatpaking of Paperwork: Issues with locale-specific files and scanner drivers

[Jerome Flesch]

Hello,


I'm trying to package Paperwork ( https://openpaper.work/ | https://github.com/openpaperwork/paperwork ), and I've hit two issues:

- Paperwork uses Tesseract for OCR, and Tesseract requires specific data files for each language ( https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/ ). All the data files for all the languages take about 600MB. Most users will use at most 2 or 3 languages, so bundling them all with Paperwork would be pretty overkill.

- Paperwork uses Sane to access scanners. However, Sane only has user-land drivers (most uses libusb I guess). Most users don't have saned (Sane daemon) enabled on their system. Therefore, libsane usually access directly the scanner(s) using the user-land drivers bundled with it. I can easily package all the open-source drivers of sane-backends with Paperwork, but some people have scanners requiring proprietary drivers. For instance, my Brother scanner is installed using a shell script provided by Brother, and this shell script download and install .deb files.

So I was wondering whether someone already had similar issues ?
Is there any recommended/official way to solve them ?