Whats the SUSE way to scan?

English Applications
1

I have Gimp installed and need to scan some documents.
I installed xsane and upon opening Gimp, there was no xsane to be found. I tried symlinking xsane to ~/gimp2-10/ and a few others with no luck. Nor is there much about it on the topic on Google. I assume I am doing it completely wrong.

Whats the SUSE method of scanning a doc in gimp? A way that will work.

2

The same way(s) as with other distros. You likely need to install xsane first. My preferred scanning app is simple-scan, but some KDE users may prefer skanlite, and Gnome has a dedicated document scanning app as well.

3

I canā€™t get any plug-ins to pop up in gimp.

Iā€™m getting ā€œdevice not foundā€ when trying to launch the apps independently.

I tried

> ln -s /usr/bin/xsane ~/.config/GIMP/2.10.28/plug-ins/

and

[FONT=monospace]> ln -s /usr/bin/xsane ~/.config/GIMP/2.10/plug-ins/

and I tried sane the same.

ā€¦as user and not root

the printer will print a test page.

> Canon MG3600 series - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.15 [/FONT]

4

Here in gimp, I go to File-Create-then I can choose to scan in my case I use xsane

The question here is, is xsane able to run by running ā€œxsaneā€

5

A working install of standalone xsane is a hard prerequisite for its invocation in gimp. Does xsane work on your system? Can you save the scan to a file? Check the installed packages by running:

**erlangen:~ #** zypper se -is sane                 
Loading repository data... 
Reading installed packages... 

S  | Name                     | Type    | Version     | Arch   | Repository 
---+--------------------------+---------+-------------+--------+----------------------- 
i  | libKF5Sane5              | package | 22.04.3-1.1 | x86_64 | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
i  | libksane-lang            | package | 22.04.3-1.1 | noarch | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
i  | libsane1                 | package | 1.1.1-1.6   | x86_64 | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
i  | sane-backends            | package | 1.1.1-1.6   | x86_64 | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
i  | sane-backends-autoconfig | package | 1.1.1-1.6   | x86_64 | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
i+ | xsane                    | package | 0.999-3.15  | x86_64 | Haupt-Repository (OSS) 
**erlangen:~ #**

Try gimp > file > create > XSane.

6

Prove that xsane is installed (as per the command Karl shared already).

Does the following report the scanner when connected?

scanimage -L

BTW, is it a USB or network-connected device?

7

User needs to be in scanner group?

groups
8

For USB-connected scanners, the ā€˜lpā€™ group is normally applicable (as that what the scanner udev rules typically assign). For network connected devices there is no such requirement.

9

what is the scanner you have ?

I ask because my Epson Eco-tank will NOT scan with xsane, it REQUIRES the Epson scan driver and to use the Epson scan tool

10

I am using the Epson Perfection V39 USB scanner. I installed:

**erlangen:~ #** zypper se -is --repo myrepo imagescan 
Loading repository data... 
Reading installed packages... 

S  | Name                         | Type    | Version                    | Arch   | Repository 
---+------------------------------+---------+----------------------------+--------+----------- 
i+ | imagescan                    | package | 3.65.0-1epson4opensuse15.2 | x86_64 | myrepo 
i+ | imagescan-plugin-gt-s650     | package | 1.0.3-1epson4opensuse15.2  | x86_64 | myrepo 
i+ | imagescan-plugin-networkscan | package | 1.1.4-1epson4opensuse15.2  | x86_64 | myrepo 
i+ | imagescan-plugin-ocr-engine  | package | 1.0.3-1epson4opensuse15.2  | x86_64 | myrepo 
**erlangen:~ #**

Xsane readily detected the scanner without further tinkering and never failed so far.

12

If youā€™re using gimp, I suppose you are scanning images.

In case youā€™re actually scanning text, and gimp isnā€™t really required, there was a post on users@lists.opensuse.org this morning that mentioned skanpage. I had not tried that one, so I installed it:

% sudo zypper install skanpage skanpage-lang tesseract-ocr-traineddata-eng
% export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/share/tessdata
% skanpage

I only need to scan English, so I did not bother with the other languages (if no tesseract language is installed, it will crash on exporting to PDF ).

It handle a multi-page scan from my document feeder well.

The OCR option was OK on a modern flyer. The OCR didnā€™t work very well when I scanned a landscape photocopy of a pair pages from old book, but the images were fine.

One thing that I did not like was that it overwrites the previous export file without warning.

Iā€™ve since put the required definition of the environment variable for language file location into /etc/profile.d/tesseract-local.sh and /etc/profile.d/tesseract-local.csh

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