[sane-devel] Mac/PC & SCSI setup for Fujitsu fi-4750C?

Mike Wirth mwirth at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 22:04:12 UTC 2012


The good news: I am now the proud owner of a Fujitsu fi-4750C scanner and
anticipate converting the mountain of paper in my life to bits in PDF files.

The bad news: I now have to revisit the sins of my youth and reconstruct a
suitable SCSI and driver environment so I can use my copy of Adobe Acrobat
9 Pro to scan directly to image PDFs and thence OCR in ClearScan format.
(ClearScan is neat -- check it out if you don't know about it. Gives you
high compression from the images scans, searchable text, *and* very legible
synthesized vector fonts -- no jaggies, by sampling the glyph bitmaps.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Adobe on Acrobat engineering, not ClearScan
directly, but my team did help with it and integrated it into Acrobat.)

I have several options for host machine and OS:
A variety of Macs, including Intel Macbooks, a PPC Mac Mini (no PCI slots
on any of these, sigh... :-) and a PPC G5 (has slots, running Mac OS X
10.5.8)
Run a Win XP VM under VMware Fusion (post-4.1 beta) on the Macbooks. (Don't
recall the SCSI support in Fusion.)
Also have an IBM ThinkPad T23 running Win XP with(!) a full (not mini) dock
with a PCI slot.
Could even buy a cheap PC to dedicate to scanning.

Re SCSI cards, I rifled through my junk bin and found a handful by ATTO,
Adaptec, etc., But it seems like driver and OS support for all of them and
compatibility with my machines is problematic. But, hey, used ones are
cheap and a glut online.

And, of course, I have a whole bushel basket of SCSI cables, terminators,
etc :-)

So here are a couple questions:
1. I'm presuming I can use SANE for part of my solution, possibly in
combination with SANE TWAIN. What configuration of hardware and SANE would
you recommend? Any experience with similar configurations?

2. How about experience with the scanner itself? Is there an internal
maintenance guide available? (I have the operator's and user maintenance
docs. And I have my own small electronics and machine shop :-)

BTW, I do software (and hardware) development and am comfortable with C
(and even have used it in anger :-)

TIA,

Mike
Palo Alto, CA
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