[sane-devel] Sending confirmation about the pixma backend

[Rolf Bensch]

Hi Rogério,

Am 05.10.19 um 00:00 schrieb Rogério Brito:
> Dear people,
>
> I just (yesterday night) bought myself a Canon PIXMA E4210 that I want to
> use *purely* with Free Software.
>
> In my limited hours with it, I found that the scanning wasn't working with
> the programs in Debian testing nor sid but that I could make it work with an
> USB cable if I installed sane-backends 1.0.28 (I actually grabbed a package
> uploaded to mentors.debian.org).
>
> Since I read the code and it mentioned that it needed testers, here is a
> report.  With the newer version of sane-backends, I can scan from the
> flatbed, as expected, and it works as well as I could expect (minus the
> fragility of this piece of hardware---disappointed with that, but that's not
> software-related, of course).

Many thanks for your report.

>
> Unfortunately, I can't scan from the ADF (which was one of the main reasons
> for me to choose this printer instead of others--with money being a 2nd
> factor, of course).

<snip>

> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> $ scanadf -d pixma:04A91855_103CD1 --mode Lineart --gamma 1 --source "Automatic Document Feeder" --output-file foo%02d.pbm
> scanadf: sane_read: Document feeder out of documents
> Scanned 0 pages
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> The printer doesn't do anything, nothing moves etc.  The ADF works if I tell
> it to scan from my Android device (but, then, the Canon app doesn't allow me
> to specify resolution, nor if I want B/W images etc.---yes, it's that
> limited).

--souce option usually resets previous settings.

Please try this:

$ scanadf -d pixma:04A91855_103CD1 --source "Automatic Document Feeder"
--mode Lineart --output-file foo%02d.pbm

For testing ADF I prefer to use gscan2pdf and for "normal" scans xsane.
You can see some logs with:

$ SANE_DEBUG_PIXMA=11 gscan2pdf

or

$ SANE_DEBUG_PIXMA=11 xsane

add this if you want to save the log into a file:

&> pixma.log

You can decrease the log level to reduce log depth (see 'man sane-pixma'
for details).

<snip>

> In the case of it being possible to return this device and get something
> else in its place, which manufacturer/model would be preferred to have
> *full* functionality with Free Software only? Any recommendations?

Please have a look at this table:
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-backends.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Rolf