<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">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.</span><div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>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, <i>and</i> 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.)</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>I have several options for host machine and OS:<br>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)<br>
Run a Win XP VM under VMware Fusion (post-4.1 beta) on the Macbooks. (Don't recall the SCSI support in Fusion.)<br>Also have an IBM ThinkPad T23 running Win XP with(!) a full (not mini) dock with a PCI slot.<br>Could even buy a cheap PC to dedicate to scanning.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>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.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">And, of course, I have a whole bushel basket of SCSI cables, terminators, etc :-)</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>So here are a couple questions:<br>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?</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>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 :-)</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>BTW, I do software (and hardware) development and am comfortable with C (and even have used it in anger :-)</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>TIA,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br>
Mike<br>Palo Alto, CA<br></span></div>