TWAIN SANE on MacOSX…

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

  1. libusb
  2. gettext
  3. SANE Backends
  4. SANE Preference Pane
  5. 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:

  1. Go to http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/
  2. Locate the backend (in my case it was sbfw.usb)
  3. 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

Sane_Preferences

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.