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TWAIN-SANE Scanner Drivers for Mac OS X

Posted by timothy on from the scan-in-your-love-letters-before-burning dept.

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."

10 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Umax USB Scanners well supported! by ZackSchil · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Umax USB Scanners well supported! by norkakn · · Score: 2, Funny

      well it would if it hadn't crapped out years ago

  2. Argh by jvmatthe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. SANE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  4. A Word of Warning by ahknight · · Score: 5, Informative

    Scanners are very stupid devices: they do EXACTLY what the driver tells them to do, up to and including:

    • Scanning off the edge of the document.
    • Overpowering the motor or lamp.
    • Trying to go both ways at the same time (for dual-motor gigs).
    • Feeding and ejecting paper at the same time in auto-loaders (thus destroying the document on dual-motor setups).

    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.

    1. Re:A Word of Warning by mpol · · Score: 4, Informative

      Using an Epson or Mustek (If I'm not wrong) scanner will be a rather safe bet. These manufacturers are working with the Sane developers, so the drivers for these scanners will work as expected.
      I myself use an Epson 1240 usb scanner, and it works great under Sane/Linux. The colors are better then with the Twain/Windows drivers that came with it.

      --

      Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
  5. Still has bugs to work out... by DLWormwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 /. should be disemvoweled
    1. Re:Still has bugs to work out... by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Same here for "Genius". I see its damn well supported (I found sane month ago), install... Scan command... Didn't work.
      I tried the test sane recommends from command line, no hope either.
      Scanner is detected well, www site and usenet posts verified it works but on mac it doesn't do what it has to do.
      We are missing something I assume...

    2. Re:Still has bugs to work out... by mpol · · Score: 5, Informative

      Your best bet is to ask for support on the Sane mailinglist at http://www.mostang.com/sane which is often very helpfull.
      What's happening at your end, is that sane-find-scanner is a kernel utility, it can find the scanner that is being recognised by your kernel, for example a scsi or usb device. The scanimage tool uses the real Sane drivers to find a supported scanner. So in essence, your kernel finds your scanner, but for some reason the Sane libraries don't find a supported scanner. I'm definitely no Mac guru, but probably you have to tell Sane what device to look for, or which Sane driver to use. Or maybe enable/disable an option in your driver config. Or maybe rn the driver with debugging options. Anyway, your best bet is imo the Sane mailinglist for this. Slashdot is not the place to ask for this kind of support.

      --

      Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
  6. How to configure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?