How I scan, was Re: xsane can't see Brother ADS-2700W scanner
On Wed 31 Mar 2021 at 07:18:14 (-0400), Dan Ritter wrote:
> Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> > The one way I did manage to get the scanner to work was to a
> > USB flash drive. It quickly sucked in a handful of sheets,
> > scanned both sides, and wrote them to a file on the stick.
> > If all else fails, I can work with it that way. But I'd
> > really like to let xsane manage the process.
That's the way I've always scanned anything. Earlier this century,
the alternatives were (a) walking to a room with "the" public scanner,
connected to a dedicated computer, and coordinating between holding
a book on the platen and pressing buttons on the screen with a mouse,
or (b) pushing a USB stick into a giant photocopier and pretending
to copy it. Also (b) had the super document feeder (1/2 sided)
and could scan up to A3, whereas (a) had a limp rubbery cover over
the A4 platen glass.
> > I'm beginning to wonder, though, whether fashions are changing.
> > Scanners nowadays seem to want to push data to a server, rather
> > than being commanded to scan by a computer. Is this really
> > happening? If so, whither (or should that be "wither") xsane?
>
> In office environments, with shared resources, this is often
> preferable. Having the scanner drop everything into a
> samba-shared filesystem, for example...
Well, yes. What's the point of controlling the scanner from your
disk when you've got to *at least* visit the scanner to place the
document in the feed hopper—why not just press a button to start
it, while you're there?
And obviously there are cases where the feeding has to be done
manually. In fact, most of my scanning is like this. (Why are
multiple-page documents being printed in the first place, so that
people have to scan them back in?)
Scanning the output to a server just seems plain obvious to me.
What's the downside?
Cheers,
David.
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