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TWAIN-SANE Scanner Drivers for Mac OS X
ubiquitin writes "The MacGIMP site has a story about TWAIN-SANE, which is a TWAIN datasource for Mac OS X that lets you use the SANE backend libraries.
It means that most if not all of the the SANE project's long list of supported hardware can now be used on Mac OS X."
That's inSANE!!!
*ducks*
good lord - will i ever get driver support for the hp 3300c scanner? 3200 and 3500, yes, but never the 3300c. aaaarrrgh.
moox. for a new generation.
Umax owners (victims?) rejoice! You no longer need to take snapshots of documents with your digital camera, the old USB scanner that's been rotting in your basement has a new lease on life!
After a post was made in the news about several requests for scanner drivers, I pointed out the open Linux drivers for several non-supported-on-OS-X scanners like two years ago to a fairly-well-trafficked Mac site. No reply. Not even a grunt of interest. Not that I thought it'd be chump work, mind you, but rather that if people really had the itch there was a means to scratch it. And it was even free!
Now, that idea finally comes to fruition. I'm glad that someone in the Mac community picked up the ball and ran with it. Thank goodness.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I thought Apple killed off SANE years ago! And what does the Standard Apple Numeric Environment have to do with scanners anyway??
I guess anyone still using it is in SANE.
Now I can use my ancient Epson 636 SCSI scanner with TWAIN, so I can scan directly into programs like Acrobat or Omnipage. I don't know any TWAIN-like drivers that can compete with pro graphics scanning applications like SilverFast, but this SANE-TWAIN driver will be awesome for the low end jobs or bulk scanning of B&W documents.
Now if only I could find a cheap used document feeder for the E636. Epson still sells them new, for $495. Hell, I could buy TWO new scanners with sheet feeders for that price.
Scanners are very stupid devices: they do EXACTLY what the driver tells them to do, up to and including:
Reading the SANE site I see that they have encountered several of these in bugs and lost several scanners and documents in the process. Before you use this, check the site for what it can and will do for your scanner and read all the warnings Bad drivers can destroy scanners.
Most of the drivers are okay, but there's always one or two that will kick you.
Having finally found a decent driver(?) for my CanoScan 656, I installed all the packages. While GraphicConverter acknowledges SANE, and the sane-find-scanner CLI tool detects my scanner, the scanimage command doesn't work. How the sane-find-scanner tool could work but not scanimage escapes me...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
I'd be interested in how this works.. I have a Umax3000, which is "unsupported" in OS X. Has anyone tried this. I mean most scanning software prescans.. slelect scan area..select resolution.. few color tweaks, SCan!
I can't find documentation on the page, although this seems a really really great idea.
I was a little confused by the steps involved. I installed the libusb package the sane backends package and the twain sane interface packages, but photoshop 7 still doesn't recognize my umax astra 1220u scanner, the twain sane install worked, because photoshop has that option under import, but the scanner is not recognized. i checked the compatability chart and it's listed. so i'm just wondering if i did something wrong?
scanimage: open of device mustek_usb:libusb:000:002 failed: Error during device I/O
This actually happened with 0.1 as well (weeks before :-) this was posted)
Maybe someone knows something about this and might help.
BTW, the scanner Im trying to run is figured out right by sane (mustek Scan Express 1200 CU)
Did anyone actually get this to work after installing? I have an old epson perfection 1200S connected along with several scsi hard drives and sane-find-scanner fails. Running scanimage causes a kernal panic and necessitates a reboot. Photoshop says there's no scanner connected, but VueScan works fine.
Unfortunately, most people porting this stuff to the Mac from Linux/Unix/BSD forget one critical thing, *good installation instructions*.
:-)
...
So, I managed to get the "product" installed using the three different installers necessary (that's crazy, make one bloody installer that installs all three parts), but all I get is an error message that "No Image Source was found by the SANE library". Looking around, it seems that I need a specific package for my scanner. OK, I seem to have found that, but there aren't any instructions I can find which tell me where the heck to PUT IT (although I'm sure some of you will have suggestions
MAC USERS NEED CLEAR MANUALS, period. If you aren't going to bother making the product usable by 99% of the installed Mac user base because you neglect to write 10 minutes worth of text that says:
Step 1: Do this
Step 2: Do that
Step 3: Put this thing here
in clear step-by-step terms, then why port the software in the first place?
/usr/local/bin/sane-find-scanner says:
# No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
# you have loaded a SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.
System profiler sees the scanner.
Vuescan sees it.
How can I tell SANE where it is?
You bought an overpriced computer. Then you pinch pennies on a shitty scanner? And you pinch the pennies even harder by not getting some of the for pay products mentioned in this thread?
I'm certain when I used Macs exclusively ('87 until '98) this would have made sense, but I'm having trouble seeing the logic now.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon