Um, okay. I could truly care less if anyone reads my blog. I was merely trying to be helpful.
But as you requested, here's the info:
hew! My upgrade to CS4 has been a complete pain in the rear from the day I pulled the DVDs out of the boxes, but it hasn’t all been Adobe’s fault. First, it was all of my out-dated filters and plug-ins I have purchased over the years. Most of the time, the software providers had been slow on the uptake, and were weeks behind developing updates for their CS3 versions. This time though, it’s Canon that is to blame, and this one takes the cake.
I have an older scanner that my mom gave me as a High School graduation present back in 2000 — a Canon CanoScan LiDE 50 bus-powered USB scanner. While I do admit that 8-years old is a long time for technology to last nowadays, but there’s a prevailing conventional wisdom in the technology community that if it isn’t broken, it should work and at least attempt to maintain a streamlined, forward-compatibility software structure. Well, before I made the move from San Francisco to Greensboro, NC, I had a couple of projects of mine that I wanted to scan, because I don’t have a nice SLR to reproduce the works digitally. Unfortunately, I could not find the USB cable for the life of me, and I didn’t feel like shelling out $50 for a USB cord for an 8-year old scanner either.
What do I find though yesterday at long last as I’m unpacking some boxes for my new rack system in the studio room, but the USB cable! I was thinking about it all last night, how I was going to sit down today and crank out these scan jobs, and relish in the fact that I have a functioning scanner again. Of course, when I go to re-install the drivers from Canon’s site, the LiDE 50 doesn’t turn on, let alone show up anywhere; not in Photoshop CS4’s TWAIN Import, not in my system’s Image Capture utility, not in VueScan, or even the ScanGear Toolbox. Not to be discouraged that easily, I hopped on the web and did some quick research, only to find this post on MacRumors.com, which led me to this freeware download on Adobe’s site. Granted, I do I have my original CS4 install discs handy in the other room, but I was feeling extra lazy, because I was up at the break of dawn this morning to take Julie to her first day of orientation at Moses Cone.
At this point, I’m feeling very optimistic. I’ve got my new drivers from Canon, my TWAIN plug-in for the CS4 platform, and a cup of coffee. I should be scanning in no time, right? It’s been about 45 minutes by now, so I plug in the scanner, and I’m ready to rock and roll at long last.
Nope. Nothing. At all. No lights on the scanner, no activity in Activity Monitor, no new devices discovered in Image Capture or in TWAIN Queue. ”What the heck is going on,” I’m wondering. ”It’s 2008, this stuff should just WORK.”
So I dug around a little deeper, and finally found what I was looking for after about another 30 minutes of pro web surfing and reading this obscure little post on MacUpdate.com by CNYMIKE.
CNYMIKE: I’ve installed the CanoScan Toolbox 5.0 for my Intel iMac but when I go into settings, the scanner doesn’t show in the dropdown because it can’t see a driver. I have the driver but do not know where to install it so that CanoScan Toolbox 5.0 can see it. Putting it in the same folder as the CanoScan Toolbox 5.0 does nothing. Neither does putting it in /library/application support/canon/ScanGear/plugins.
So that got me thinking — “I should check my directories and see if those folders even exist on my system.” Lo and behold, they didn’t. And at long last, I was sure I had found the solution to this convoluted problem. I quickly created the following two directories on my file system, under my main user account:
/Library/Application Support/Canon/ScanGear/Plugins
/Library/Application Support/Canon/ScanGear/Plug-ins
I’m not sure which is the correct directory, honestly. I merely created them both on my drive, and re-ran the driver installation, assigning the installation to each of the folders (after fully un-installing previous installation attempts, of course). I took a sip of the last bit of my coffee, crossed my fingers, and opened up the CanoScan Toolbox software.
Nothing, again.
More frustrated than words could describe, I stood up and walked away from the computer, and moreover the scanner, so that nothing was broken in the fit of anger. ”Hmm…I bet I didn’t set something up right in the CanoScan Toolbox software,” I was thinking. So I walked back over, and looked at the Configuration dialogs. ”Eureka! — that’s gotta be it!.” A little empty box near the bottom of the panel says, “Link scanned image to…” but the link box was empty. I clicked the “Set” button, and navigated to where I had dumped the CS4 TWAIN plug-in inside my Photoshop CS4 directory (Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS4/Plug-ins/Import-Export/TWAIN.plugin) and hit Enter. Suddenly the “SCAN” button was actually clickable. Excitement filled my little heart.
I hit “SCAN”, and good Lord, my scanner awoke from a four year slumber, just as if it had never hibernated a day in its life.
Ah, it feels so good to figure that out. Archaic, convoluted, and backwards are just a few ways to describe the process I had to go through to get this to work. I can’t fault Adobe, because it is definitely not their fault. But I certainly have some words for the developers at Canon who built this installer out. Moreover, the lack of documentation is pretty disturbing. It makes me wonder what their motives are for something so atrociously messed up. Are they too tapped for time and resources to develop this out correctly? Do they just want the masses to give up, and go buy a new printer? I really don’t know, but whatever the motives, it’s been a routine in impractical programming and software engineering, and an interesting lesson in perseverance.
The main reason that I decided to blog this though was to help anyone else out there who comes across the same problem. Hopefully this can help them the way it helped me, and possibly save them another $150-200 that they would have otherwise have spent on a brand new printer when they didn’t need it.
Feel free to check my blog's comments --
http://blog.dylanmullins.com/ for similar solutions that other users have found to their unique computer setups.
I no longer feel the need to break things and shout a lot.
