scan oversized images & merge results

[aerials]

hey all

I'm about to get hands at some piles of schematics that I would like to archive in a digital form.
The problem is, that these schematics are larger than the regular A4 sheets that I'm able to scan with my scanner. This means I need two scans for one schematic, which leads me to the problem, that I need to merge the two images.
What would be the best way to do this?
I know I could just do two scans per image and merge the resulted files manually in the gimp. But it would be quite difficult, to achieve exact results and I hesitate to do this manually for 300+ schematics.
Would a panoramic software/plugin do this? The way I scan, I would get quite a big overlapping area, which should make the process easier. I don't know how well such a program would perform with black&white/grayscale graphics, since I've only seen mergers of photographs so far.

Would imagemagick or something similar be able to do the job I want? Regarding the number of schematics I'm about to scan, I would prefer a straightforward commandline way to get the job done efficiently.

So, does anybody know a better way to do what I want, than the way I imagine?
Can anybody point me to a good panoramic software or gimp plugin?
Any commandline ways?

thx a lot

[mips]

Dunno how many images you have to scan but you could always use the reduction facility on a photo copier to shrink the schematics to A4 and then scan them on your scanner.

[aerials]

Thanks for your input, I didn't think about that possibility. I only fear, that the quality of the images will suffer, if I copy them first.

[mips]

Thanks for your input, I didn't think about that possibility. I only fear, that the quality of the images will suffer, if I copy them first.

Very dependend on the detail in the schematics. I used to do this for schematics of electronic circuits which have a lot of detail and they usually came out fine. You can always try one and see what it looks like.