unpaper doesn't seem to be good at deskewing. It fails on test case
with a lot of italics. I think it also struggles on pages with a lot
of whitespace. Leptonica continues to shine here.
However, this is only a first crack at Leptonica. The leptonica module
should be redone to use cffi (more extensible).
Also considering the possibility of making all Lept calls in a forked
process to insulate the calling process from C code crashes and the
messy redirect of stdout/stderr to read Leptonica's errors.
I don't think the redirect is a huge problem as long as multiprocesses
rather than multithreads are used. The ruffus child process that is
handling a page is single threaded and will not be affected by the
redirection. It just feels dirty. The main reason to consider a child
process is crash isolation.
James R. Barlow
b49f5a7d77