[macvoiceover] Maybe OT: another scanning solution
- From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:21:38 -0500 (CDT)
For anybody finding that readiris and/or vuescan are not working for some
reason, there is an option in the terminal using macports. This only works
with supported scanners, of which the canoscan lide 60 is one but the lide
90 unfortunately is not. You will have to check for your individual
scanner. My lide 60 is actually covered in the genesys conf file because
it is usb and the other supported canons are not. You may have to do some
research to find out whether or not your scanner is supported.
1. Install macports from www.macports.org
2. Install the macports ports for twain-sane, sane-backends and tesseract.
You don't need xsane.
3. Make sure the Macosx driver for your scanner is NOT installed (at least
for lide 60 and probably others).
4. Plug in scanner. Pick something to scan and place it in the scanner
oriented correctly. For my scanner this meant facedown with top and bottom
oriented correctly. You'll get nothing but gibberish if the orientation is
wrong.
5. Type
scanimage --format=tiff > scanfile.tif
6. If the scanner runs and finishes successfully type:
tesseract scan.tif textfile
6. If this completes without errors, open textfile.txt in textedit.
Notes:
The file names I've given are just examples. Tesseract needs to see a .tif
extension to run the file but it will supply the .txt on the end of the
output file. Even though the file format is tiff the extension you need is
.tif with only one f.
The scans you will get will vary in quality. An envelope had lots of
extraneous junk but I was able to find the relevant information; the bill
inside the envelope was readable but again had extraneous stuff. A page
from a book scanned quite well. There are, however, lots of formatting
needs that tesseract doesn't handle at this poit. But if you just want to
find out what your mail is and be able to read it to some extent or you
want to scan book pages, it should be adequate if your scanner is
supported. One big incentive of this method is that it won't cost you any
money.
You MUST either have the page oriented correctly or do scans with the page
in various orientations to get a scan with anything legible.
If you have trouble running scanimage as a user, you can try using sudo or
su to do this as root. You can also try:
chmod +s /opt/local/bin/scanimage
I had no problem with this in Macports but did have a problem with it on
my linux machine.
--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
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