Other things to try

Questionnaire-ID

If it is required, you can put a unique barcode on every created questionnaire. This is internally called the “Questionnaire-ID” by SDAPS.

To do this, you need to add the print_questionnaire_id to the document class before running the setup routine. The document will now also contain a barcode for the “Questionnaire-ID” which will be located in the bottom left corner of the page.

In this setup it is now necessary to generate the required amount of unique documents. This is done using the stamp command in SDAPS. You have the choice of either creating numeric random IDs, or supplying a set of IDs (anything that can be encoded in CODE128 is allowed) in a file.

For example, to create 15 questionnaires with randomized IDs you can run

$ sdaps stamp /tmp/project -r 15

To specify non-random IDs create a file with one ID per line. It might look like the following. Lets call it ids.txt:

First ID
Second ID
Some Name

Then run the stamp command, with the created file as an argument:

$ sdaps stamp /tmp/project -f ids.txt

Both commands will create a new stamp_X.pdf file (where X is a number) which can be printed.

Global-ID

There is a third ID that SDAPS can have (besides the internal Survey-ID and Questionnaire-ID), which is called the “Global-ID”. This ID is printed in the center of the page and exists for user defined purposes. It is not used by SDAPS itself but, will be exported for user defined purposes.

An example use case for the “Global-ID” might be handing out the same questionnaire in different lectures. You could encode the lecture in the “Global-ID” and separate everything using this information.

Annotate

As mentioned before, you can create a PDF to see if the values read from the designed questionnaire are all correct (checkbox positions, etc.). To use run:

$ sdaps annotate /tmp/project

The file annotated_questionnaire.pdf is created. Might be a bit ugly, but one can easily check that everything is good.

Reorder

To try out this command we need a questionnaire that is printed on multiple pages, and unique Questionnaire-IDs.

If the questionnaire has multiple pages it can happen that the pages get mixed before the scan happens. The “reorder” command will sort all pages so that everything is together again.

First identify all pages ie. read all the barcodes:

$ sdaps recognize /tmp/project --identify

Then reorder the pages:

$ sdaps reorder /tmp/project

And when that is done you can do the normal “recognize” step:

$ sdaps recognize /tmp/project

Using a camera for input

It is possible to use a cell phone camera image instead of a scanner. Usually it is a lot faster to use a feed scanner, but there may be certain cases where this is useful.

Some example images are in cellphone.tar or cellphone-2.tar (the second one is required if you have a newer version of the multicol package). To try it, extract the archive (in this example to /tmp/ and then run the following commands:

$ sdaps convert /tmp/project --3d-transform /tmp/cellphone/*.jpg --output /tmp/out.tif
$ sdaps add /tmp/project /tmp/out.tif

The --3d-transform is important as the SDAPS main Program only does a 2D transformation which is not good enough for camera images (as they usually will not be taken exactly from above).

After this, the normal recognize step is done.