Installing TWAIN SANE for unsupported scanner on MacOS X…
I am writing this to help others who might get stuck installing TWAIN-SANE on their Mac’s for unsupported scanners.
For those who don’t know this.. TWAIN-SANE is a set of libraries that allows you to plug in “unsupported” older scanners to your Mac. I have a Mustek 1200 UB Plus that I had been trying to connect to my mac for a while, till I was able to figure this out.
The first thing you need to do is download the following files from: http://www.ellert.se/twain-sane
- libusb
- gettext
- SANE Backends
- SANE Preference Pane
- TWAIN SANE Interface
Install them in the order shown above.
Next you need to locate the backend for your scanner. Without this step, I suspect you will be unable to make your scanner work. At least in my case that was one of the the issues. I had to go to do the following:
- Go to http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/
- Locate the backend (in my case it was sbfw.usb)
- Place it in the appropriate directory (in my case: /usr/local/share/sane/gt68xx/)
The chipset in my scanner corresponds to gt68xx, hence I am using this and not the Mustek options, even though my scanner is a Mustek.
I did have to run 2 additional commands:
sudo chown root /usr/local/share/sane/gt68xx/sbfw.usb
sudo vi /usr/local/etc/sane.d/gt68xx.conf
and set:
# Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus:
override “mustek-scanexpress-1200-ub-plus”
The last part above can also be done thru System Preferences –> Sane –> gt68xx –> Drivers –> Configure
There might be a few minor differences based on the type of scanner you have.
Hopefully if you have done this you should have your scanner up and running in MacOS X without any issues. I am using image capture to connect to my scanner. Just showing a snapshot below.
And… there are a couple of resolutions where things get messed up. I believe that is a known issue. Just use other resolutions.
BTW: you can also use the command line 🙂
scanimage –format=tiff –mode=Color –resolution=300 > ~/Desktop/my_scan.tiff
scanimage –help ,will give you other options.