Scanning

Hopefully, the info here can give some info about some options you have when scanning something, how-to clean the glass of you scanner if needed, ...

file format

• bits-per-pixels
  

When you scan something with > 24 bits per pixel, there are only 2 fileformats I know off that can store the resulting image while keeping all the bits per pixel: tiff and png. I know that png and tiff can store up to 48 bits-per-pixel. I do not know if they can stire more bits per pixel. bmp can store up-to 24 bits-per-pixel.

• storing icc-profiles in files

png and tiff can store icc-profiles

• compression

There also a lot of different variations of tiff, while I believe png is a quite strict format. With tiff you can choose different kinds of compression-methods: group3 (black-and-white-images?, lossless), group4 (lossless), ...
png is a lossless format

Tiff has a file-size-limit of 4 GB.

automatically creating icc profile for scanner(?)

software-program lcms? looking at the online documentation of the scribus-program seems also a good point to gather info.

while this is not the place ... it seem that the Xserver also has icc-capabilities, but it is not really known or something. The command "man -k cms" can maybe help you if you're interested in this.