Well, this has very low priority for me, because saving into Pdf is not a very good take for images... 
See for example the paragraph 
  2004 Mar 21: A comment to PDF
on http://www.xsane.org for an explanation.

The reason why I would like to have the docs as PDF is that a PDF reader is available everywhere.

I have, however, solved my local problem by writing a small wrapper script around scanimage and convert.

I find the ability to scan direct to PDF very useful with the full version of Acrobat. Often I need to scan the signature page of a document to attach to the PDF document, or I wish to email a multi page document which can only be scanned.

Whilst PDF is a large format for images, it does support multi page images very well and has wide support across a number of platforms.

I'm not sure if it was worth a new wish, since it's heavily related to that one, but now it's too late, sorry. I just want to point those who are watching this wish to Bug 90060 for another argument for introducing pdf output :) 

If you want a small B&W pdf file, use this script below.

save this file as pdfscan in /usr/bin and chmod it to make user executable.

#!/bin/bash

usage()
{
echo "Usage: pdfscan {nameofimage.pdf}"
}

#test to see if a filename has been entered
if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then usage ; exit 1 ; fi
name=$1

#Read output of help command to get scanner device name
#scanner=`scanimage --help | tail --lines=1 | sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | tail --lines=1  `
scanner='scanimage -f %d | sed -e 's/0/\n/g' | tail --lines=1 '

echo Now scanning your A4 document on $scanner

#scan the A4 binary(b&w) file uncompressed at 300dpi to temporary file
scanimage -d $scanner --mode binary --resolution 300 --quick-format A4 --format tiff >temp-$name.tif

#Use tif utility to convert the temporary binary tif to a G4 compressed tif and then delete the temporary file
#tiffcp -c g4 temp-$name.tif $name.tif
#rm -f temp-$name.tif

# display resulting G4 tiff file
#kfax temp-$name.tif 

#convert to pdf with G4 compression
tiff2pdf temp-$name.tif -p A4 -q G4 -o $name

#display pdf
kghostview $name

I read the reason for 'low priority' at Xsane. From a technological point of view this makes sense to me: PDF-Files with pictures in it really get huge. But most of the people I have to send multi page images wouldn't know how to use the suggested alternatives (postscript, tiff or pnm). However, kooka is also not offering the postscript-alternative. Postscript export for multi page images would be fine.

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

The statement at the the xsane page is not true. The main advantage of PDF is that it can be searchable and that common readers support multi page documents unlike tiff-viewers.
Have a look at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrcapture/main.html and especially the paragraph "Output Formats" at http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/317791.html

The inability of Linux to scan directly to multi-page pdf (as in PaperPort by Scansoft or Adobe Acrobat) is one of the two remaining reasons why I cannot completely divorce Bill Gates.

Scanning photos to pdf is not the desire, nor the request.  The ability / option to scan all types of documents to searchable pdf's is.  Likewise, scanning documents to png's or tiff's is not useful...it is impractical to create a separate OCR text file for each tiff in order to search a large archive.

I need the ability to scan, archive, and search gigabytes of local documents for work.  Web-based Linux programs do not meet privacy / confidentiality needs.  Pdf is the ideal format for many reasons.  Scanning 5000 documents with a document feeder, first to png, and then printing each one to pdf, is an impracticality which prohibits me from migrating to Linux to get my work done.  As much as I dislike Windows, it lets me do this.

Thanks to innumerable "Linuxophiles", this OS does not need to "compete" with Windows...it rightfully stands on its own.  I want to use Linux only...as soon as it meets my work needs.

Please consider improving Kooka's functionality so that I can finally file those  divorce papers.

That's my wish too. It would be usefull to scan documents and saving them into PDF file. I, for example, recently received copied article (no picture, just text) from book from professor and my classmates wanted to send them through mail. How to do it? Send them 5 JPG files? Very impractically... But send them whole article in PDF format would be more practicall.

And why not add ability to save text in ODT file using Openoffice and/or Kword?

Created attachment 21061 [details]
scan2pdf shell script 

PDF also supports embedded compression, which significantly reduces the size of
documents.

I've attached the shell script I'm currently using for this task.

Marking as duplicate, 94522 has additional wish for TIFF saving as well as PDF (and the same pdfscan script).

Regarding comment #9, producing "searchable PDF" requires OCR.  Not sure if the state-of-the-art on Linux is enough for that yet.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 94522 ***

(In reply to comment #1)
> Well, this has very low priority for me, because saving into Pdf is not a
> very good take for images... 
> See for example the paragraph 
>   2004 Mar 21: A comment to PDF
> on http://www.xsane.org for an explanation.

No longer on xsane.org, but from the Wayback Machine:

2004 Mar 21: A comment to PDF
A lot of people ask for support for saving to PDF files. The reason they ask is that they think that the PDF format is the general exchange format. This is true for text based documents but scanned documents are 100% image based. You would get huge documents that can not be searched, you do not have any advantages by using PDF. That is the reason why I will not add support for the PDF format. It simply does not make sense!
I plan to add support for multiple page files for postscript, tiff and maybe pnm.

The advantage of PDF >= 1.4 is that it supports JBIG2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2