Scan Again... If you have an older or used scanner that you want to use, and the manufacturer doesn’t have drivers for your operating system, one solution is to use the open-source SANE routines. These were originally developed for Linux, but work on other operating systems, including Mac OS X. I had this problem with an HP scanner I picked up at a rummage sale, and was able to get it to work using SANE. The trouble was that the SANE utilities are all command-line, and I got tired of typing.

I decided to make a GUI shell to interface with the command-line utilities, and I did this using RealBasic. The resulting program runs the command-line utilities for you. It searches for scanners, putting the results into a pop-up at the top of the window. It then interrogates the selected scanner for available options, and populates the spinners and pop-ups with the options available for the given scanner.

The “Preview” button causes a low-resolution scan to be made and displayed in the window. It is possible to limit the detailed scan to a selected area of the image, to save time and file size, by drag-clicking a selection rectangle across the preview image.

The “Scan” button causes a detailed scan to be made, after you have a chance to choose the file name and location for the result. The only file type that is supported currently is TIFF. This scanned result will be opened in another application if you have that checkbox checked. The default application is Preview, but you can choose others with the “Choose” button.

You can also use the program as a “copier”, by pressing the “Copy” button. This will scan the image, and send the result to a printer.

The name comes from the fact that with this program and SANE, the scanner I bought was able to scan again. I was going to call it Lazarus, but that seemed too pretentious. I cannot promise to provide support for this free program, but if you have found a solution to a problem or have improvements to the program, I would appreciate hearing about it and receiving a copy.