2013-12-31 Scanner Again

We decided to switch from the Apple Mac Mini running Mac OS 10.6.8 (since it’s such an old machine it cannot be upgraded) to Claudia’s 13” Powerbook running the latest Mac OS 10.9.1.

And, as always, the old CanoScan LiDE 25 doesn’t work. The latest drivers are for Mac OS 10.6 – yay. I found a blog post, fixed: use unsupported scanner in OSX 10.9 Mavericks, which had me install some promising libs. But it didn’t work. The Printer & Scanner preference pane never found the old scanner, and on the command line I didn’t get the scanner listed.

fixed: use unsupported scanner in OSX 10.9 Mavericks

I decided to give Homebrew a try and installed **sane-backends**. This required a painful and slow uninstalling of libusb and the sane-backends installed by the promising libs I had just installed.

Homebrew

Using the sane-backends installed by Homebrew, I can now scan from the command line. Oh well, better than nothing.

alex@Megabombus:~$ scanimage -L
device `plustek:libusb:004:002' is a Canon CanoScan LiDE25 flatbed scanner
Trace/BPT trap: 5
alex@Megabombus:~$ scanimage --device=plustek:libusb:004:002 --format=tiff --mode=color --resolution=300 -l 0 -t 0 -x 215 -y 297 > Desktop/scan.tiff
Killed: 9
alex@Megabombus:~$ open Desktop/scan.tiff

It works. 👌

Since the scanner is not supported by Image Capture, I can’t use it to scan from Gimp. 👎

The TWAIN-SANE-Interface and the SANE-Preference-Pane I installed appear to be useless. Oh well. 👎

And now that I have scanned the picture I just need to reinstall Tex Live 2013 since the migration appears to have failed. 👎

Tex Live 2013

​#OSX ​#Scanner

Comments

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The latest SANE binaries provided on the site work, but still do not result in a functional Image Capture..

– Anonymous 2014-01-23 01:06 UTC

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You can use xsane from Homebrew, it’s a graphical frontend for SANE.

– Anonymous 2014-03-22 20:13 UTC

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Wow, xsane works! At first I was confused because I got a low-resolution image every time. Then I saw the menu item “show resolution list” and managed to switch to 300 dpi. Thanks for the pointer!

– Alex Schroeder 2014-03-30 21:49 UTC

Alex Schroeder

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Hi Alex

I’ve been having trouble with this program. I installed it through brew first, along with libusb, and it couldn’t detect the scanner (but it did see it with sane-find-scanner -v. It said it wasn’t configured. I followed the man instructions and entered the vendor id and product id in the proper conf and still nothing.

then I removed it and llibusb and compiled them both and still the same error. How did you get yours to work? The scanner is detected on my linux box without any issues. Just OS X giving me a hard time.

Thanks for any help

Nima

– nima 2018-04-03 16:39 UTC

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Hello Nima

On the old Apple laptop running the latest macOS, the scanning app still works (or has been working for years without me doing anything), so I can’t really help you. 😟

Good luck with the scanner!

– Alex Schroeder 2018-04-05 06:48 UTC

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Thanks anyway Alex 🙂 I’ll try to see if I can install it on another Apple machine and go from there. If I’m lucky I’ll come back and let you know! Thank you for replying so quick.

Nima

– Nima 2018-04-06 07:02 UTC

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On the new MacBook Air running Ventura, the scanner no longer works and the driver cannot be installed.

Linux it is!

– Alex 2023-07-29 14:49 UTC