Snac - Mac OSX GUI for SANE scanimage

I recently got an Artec scanner (e48-U) from a collegue. Unfortunately, I couldn't easily find a Mac OSX driver for it. After some searching I found SANE, an open source project for scanner access that's compatible with a wide variety of scanners. While SANE solved the problem with the driver, I lacked a good frontend for OSX. There is a TWAIN interface developed by Mattias Ellert, but I had problems with frequent crashes requiring restart of PhotoShop. Included in the SANE backend is a small command line program called scanimage, but since scanning is a really graphical task, I figured a graphical interface would be good...

This prompted me to make Snac, a GUI (graphical user interface) for scanimage. The program is small and limited in it's abilities, but it allows you scan a preview and to select an area from that preview to scan. You can also set the resolution and scanmode before scanning. Since Snac only is a GUI, you need to download and install the SANE backend before you can use it. The easiest way to do this is to use Mattias Ellert's precompiled binary that can be downloaded from his homepage.

Snac is distributed as a freeware without guaranties and can be downloaded here. If you use it, and is satisfied or have a problem you are more than welcome to contact me on the adress in the page header. It has only been tested with an Artec e-48U scanner, if you try it on a different scanner, please let me know!

For more information, see the documentation.

Known bugs

At the moment, the selection in the preview window is not resizable. You'll need to make a new selection to make it a different size.

Also, canceling a scan sometimes freezes the scanner.

System requirements

• Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger)
• SANE backend