[chucker]

Here I was thinking this would be a matter of plug & play. Nope.

My father has the aforementioned scanner. It isn't great, but it gets the job done just fine; we only ever use it for documents, really.

I was trying to scan in a piece of paper. I connected the scanner to my USB port. yep said no scanner connected. Image Capture said the same. System Profiler, however, did list the device correctly identified and named.

Now, there is a $50 plug-in from SilverFast, but not only is it for 10.3 Panther and lower; it's also ridiculous to pay this much for a scanner that's probably worth less by now. (Might as well get a new cheapo scanner that would actually work, eh?) Plus, I don't want all those advanced options from SilverFast. I just want to scan a document!

UMAX's US site doesn't list the model at all, and their Germany website says there is no driver for Mac OS X. Comments at VersionTracker reflect this absurd behavior of UMAX's. Would it kill them to provide a simple driver?

Then there's the Linux SANE project. It lists the device as unsupported, but notes that it "[w]ill most probably work with the Genesys backend, when it's finished." That backend is at 1.0.16 now.

Thus, I installed TWAIN SANE for Mac OS X, including its preference pane. It includes the Genesys backend, and a configuration, but the Astra 4700 isn't listed, and the presumably similar Astra 4500 is listed as "not yet supported; un-comment only for development purposes". So I haven't tried manually adding the 4700 to that list, but I'm not very optimistic anyway. (Will try and report back later, of course.)

I suppose what I'm wondering is… are scanners always such a pain to get to work at all? Isn't TWAIN supposed to be a standard interface? If not, what's its point? I can get a printer and a digital camera to work without any driver install, just by plugging them in. Why not a scanner? I shouldn't have to look for a driver, much less buy one that isn't even compatible with the OS that's been out for almost two years now.

Any suggestions for a cheap scanner? Seriously, I don't really need photos, I don't need color correction, all I need is compatibility with Image Capture so I can have yep do its PDF thing.

[chucker]

SilverFast installed shortcuts in / and ~/Desktop (I feel like I'm on Windows), and beachballs on startup.

/usr/local/bin/sane-find-scanner -v -v

…recognizes the scanner and gives a device ID. However,

/usr/local/bin/scanimage -d libusb:005:003-0638-0a20-ff-ff

…claims no scanner was found.

man sane-genesys

…doesn't list the scanner as supported. It lists the SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS and SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS_GL646 environment variables, but gives no information on where they actually store debug info to. I can't find anything in system.log or console.log, or anything sane-specific in /var/log at all, nor a /usr/local/var/log directory or something.

Seems a lost cause.

[chucker]

There's a proper driver for Windows XP, so Parallels will (have to) do for now.

Effectively, I have to:

1. Boot into Windows XP in Parallels
2. In Control Panel, open Scanners and Cameras, and launch the wizard for my scanner (I tried three different third-party apps. One crashed, another produced random patches of color rather than actual images, and the third scanned but didn't open or save the resulting file.)
3. Choose a lossless image format (PDF not supported) and a network path (the native OS on my Mac) as the destination
4. Scan
5. Open the result in Preview
6. Print…
7. Choose Add to Yep
8. Wait for the Workflow to finish (it's needlessly slow)
9. Open Yep
10. Enter Metadata

Way less than ideal, when Yep has built-in scanning instead that I could use if only there was a working driver.

[Fahrenheit]

You like these 1 way threads, don't you Chucker?

[chucker]

Yes, I adore it when nobody is of any help.

[chucker]

Okay, I wrote a launchd LaunchAgent with a WatchDirectory that takes care of steps five through eight automatically, so by the time I'm done scanning, I can already open Yep and it'll have PDF images.

Having to rely on Windows is still a kludge, though