Xinsane

Another Linux lie: we can scan.

Truth: you cannot.

Refugees from Windows environments come spoiled by high-quality software that they acquire as bundled with their scanners. It always works fine, it is always intelligent, and it overall helps to be productive. On the contrary, Linux scanning is lame, buggy, counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly, and, ironically, insane, even though the core scanning infrastructure under linux calls itself sane.

Xsane is one of the higher quality products for scanning under Linux. It kind of works: it can scan single-page documents. Congratulations, Oliver Rauch: your programming prowess is truly incredible! But what about automatic document feeders of modern MFUs? He pretends to support them by... having a user create "projects".

Read it again: it is not enough to pick ADF from the drop down. You have to switch your target from Save to Multipage, which opens another window that forces you to browse for another file, different from the file you have already designated as the target on the main window. Then you struggle to understand what to do next because this new window cannot be closed. It has counter-intuitive controls that mean nothing to someone who is used to Windows scanner software.

And, Tada! To add insult to injury, after switching Xsane into multipage mode, you scan and, WTF? You still end up with a single-page PDF. It simply ignores the rest of the pages, after scanning the 1st one. Xinsane!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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