this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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The scanner at my last job was great. It was part of the printer, set up by central IT, and could send the scanned document to my email address. 10/10 scanner.
The AIO printer / copier / scanner I bought myself for WFH sucks as a scanner. Mostly because I'm on Linux, and there just isn't an easy way to get the documents from the scanner to my computer. I often just use Photoscan on my phone.
A few years back I bought a networked xerox scanner for that reason - its not ideal and rather outdated, but at that time was pretty much the only thing with a document feeder capable of generating multi page PDFs without having to control it from app or computer.
I'd be thrilled if it had a USB port, and I could just have it scan to USB. But nooooooo...
For your home office, see this article and then pass it along to friends. It just makes everything easier: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine
Very similar to the Brother AIO that I have. It scans fine, it's just that the Linux app that communicates with the scanner is immensely frustrating.
If your scanner works on your phone and you have a Linux desktop, you should be able to drive it from your Linux desktop. The Document Scanner app from the Gnome project (Debian package name:
simple-scan) is pretty good.If your desktop doesn't see the scanner on the network, you can try connecting it by USB and using the
ipp-usbprogram, which publishes it on the local Avahi daemon where Document Scanner will look for it.Personally, I'd only ever connect it by USB anyway. Network-attached printers/scanners tend to be horribly insecure. Although many of those vulnerabilities can also be exploited through a Linux print/scan server as well, so this isn't an airtight solution either. Really, the best thing you can do for the security of your network is to not have any printers or scanners anywhere near it.
When the poster says "I often just use Photoscan on my phone" what they mean is "instead of dealing with the physical scanner at all I often use an app on my phone that takes a picture of a document with the phone's camera, flattens out the image in software, and leaves me with a pdf the same as if the scanner were doing its job".
That is, the scanner doesn't "work on the phone", but these days phone cameras and automatic image processing programs are so good actual scanners can often be bypassed.
I've got a Brother AIO printer/scanner, and it has a Linux driver. Even for the scan function.
I can start the brscan service on my Linux machine and then just press the scan to PC button on the scanner and the scans land in ~/brscan/ over the network.
... I had gone to the Brother site for drivers, but not noticed any of the scanner stuff. It's less than intuitive, but once it works, it works! Thanks!