University of Minnesota Institute of Technology     One Stop   Directories   Search U of M 
School of Mathematics

Operating a Scanner

Computer Systems Guide
Printing, E-Mail

The scanner is attached to the machine 'dunebuggy' in room 314, and is an Epson color flatbed scanner with 2400x4800dpi resolution.

Use xsane to operate the scanner. An old scanner tutorial is available in the MCIM pages, but some command details have changed.

Getting images

The Math Department has a 2MP digital camera, if you'd like to use it for University related projects.

Film rolls can be digitized and burnt to CD for less than $20 at many film developers.

A flatbed scanner is available in Vincent Hall 314.

Scanning Images from the Command Line

A command line scanning program is available, see the man page for more details. 
$ scanimage --format tiff --mode Color > foo.tiff; eog foo.tiff
ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools for working with images. It can resize, rotate, crop and perform many of the operations that desktop photo editing software can do.

Troubleshooting Problems with ScanImage

If scanimage can't detect the scanner, try listing the permissions of the /dev/scanner* device and the usb entry it points to. To access the scanner, an account needs read/write access to the usb device. When Fedora 8 comes up the scanner is owned by root:lp, and when someone logs into the desktop the ownership is changed to user:lp. 
$ ls -l /dev/scanner-2-6  /dev/bus/usb/002/003
crw-rw---- 1 jdoe  lp   189, 130 2008-07-25 17:46 /dev/bus/usb/002/003
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root  root       15 2008-07-25 17:24 /dev/scanner-2-6 -> bus/usb/002/003
$ scanimage -L
device `epson:libusb:002:003' is a Epson GT-9300 flatbed scanner

Scanning Images with xsane

Keep in mind that quotas do apply for saving in your home directory so plan ahead before scanning a large or resolute image. It is possible also to save the image in /var/tmp. We recommend that if you are going to save in the /var/tmp directory, that you make a subdirectory to avoid conflicts with other users.
  1. Put the scan object on the scan bed.
  2. Start the scanning software 
    	$ cd ~
	$ xsane
  3. Accept the license if you want to use xsane.
  4. Four windows should open: Main, Histogram, Standard Options and Preview.

    Main
    Standard Options
    Histogram

    Preview
  5. Acquire a preview image. Click the "Acquire preview" button in the preview window. The scanner head will whir back and forth for less than a minute.
  6. Change the color mode. The default color mode is binary (aka black or white), but most people will want scans in either greyscale or color. Change the color model pull down in the Main window to select a color model besides binary.
  7. Select the region to scan in detail. Click and drag a rectangular region in the scan preview. Whatever you want to scan, it can be enclosed in a rectangular box. To tell the software about what the region is, click in the lower left corner, hold the mouse button down and drag to the upper right corner. Lift up on the mouse button.
  8. Click the "Scan" button in the main xsane window. The scanner head will whir back and forth. A window title "Viewer" will open with the scanned region.
  9. Save the image. In the "Viewer" window, select the file menu and click on the "Save Image" menu entry. If the image is text, xsane can also to convert it to text using optical character recognition (OCR).
Images can be viewed with web browsers, the desktop file browser, and applications like "eog" or "gthumb".

The Gnu Image Manipulation Program (Gimp) is a photo editor available on Linux (Mac and Windows) you can use to crop and edit the scans.

Institute of Technology
math.umn.edu/systems_guide/scanner/
Last Modified July 25, 2008
Contact the School of Mathematics
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
© 2008, The Regents of the University of Minnesota
  Enter keyword search