It did take around 3 months of work, with lots of testing, but we did it. Even the manufacturer had lost all instances of the software, and once we contacted them to ask for guidence, they were not able to give any and in fact ended asking us to send them the software so that they would have a copy of it.Īnd so we decided to completely reverse engineer the serial data connection and recreate the analysis display. The software was released in 1999 with only one minor update in 2001. Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully functioning, medical eye scanner whose companion software was so old that it had become increasingly difficult to run it. In comparison, finding digital documents is trivial. It's hard to find paper documents: there are too many. When I buy furniture or another appliance, I throw away the paper manual and store the digitally scanned version. The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. Strongly recommended if you need to scan more than a few pages on a regular basis. It can generate PDFs with selectable and searchable text! It can't preview in color but save in black & white.Īnd OCR. It has limited color correction capability (which is important for making black & white documents. The builtin scanner can rotate, but it can't preview the rotation. Previwing is crucial in order to determine what to crop or rotate, but scanning another time after the preview wastes a lot of time. The builtin scanner in macOS allows either previewing, or scanning into a file, but it can't save the preview into a file. My main use case for VueScan is scanning lots of pages in a document while performing necessary cropping and rotation and color correction on each page, and possibly saving the end result in a multi-page PDF.

I've been using VueScan for years and it's great.

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