automatic scanning of paper documents

 It used to be that scanners were tricky to attach to Linux. No more.  My faithful Canon MX700 prints without hassle, scans using 'xsane', does batch scanning!

Here's the magic to do scanning from the automatic feeder:

scanimage --format=tiff --batch='page%02d.tif'  --source='Automatic Document Feeder'

more info:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-scan-image-commands/