Ok, so I got the nice scanner-printer-copymachine-combo named DCP-7010 from Brother. Just some small things to mention:
- Printer Driver installation using the CUPS-Wrapper system went smooth following the description given by the brother people, i.e.
- Scanner Driver installation also went smooth:
Xsane instantly could work with the scanner (I'm impressed - not necessarily because of the scanner - it is good for black/white and grey scans, not really good for colours - but because of the smooth installation)
- The BrKey tool enabling the support for the hardware "Scan-to-Email", "Scan-to-File", "Scan-to-Image" and "Scan-to-text" keys also worked buuuuuut: the fine tuning might be a little tricky, so here are some hints how to optimize your workflow:
Each of those "scanning options" simply invokes a script which does the work. You can find the scripts in the folder
/usr/local/Brother/sane/script
if you want to edit them, be sudo, if you want to work with them, be a normal user.
Change the resolution to your needs. I also wanted to change the scan length (in standard, it is obviously set to be 35cm, which is a
little too much for normal A4 or letter...)
you can achieve that by adding the option
-y 298.00 to the "scanimage" command. I furthermore wanted to have the scan not in 24bit color, but in b/w and wanted to get a pdf file out of it. Don't use the line brother suggests. For me the following script worked, so I'll just copy it here - I think most of it is self-explaining. BTW: with
scanimage --help you can get the specific driver options for the brother as well, if you want to fiddle around more (but - Black & White seems to be just "Black", at least it worked for my model)
#! /bin/sh
set +o noclobber
#
# $1 = scanner device
# $2 = friendly name
#
#
# 100,200,300,400,600
#
resolution=400
device=$1
mkdir -p ~/brscan
if [ "`which usleep`" != '' ];then
usleep 10000
else
sleep 0.01
fi
output_file=`mktemp ~/brscan/brscan.XXXXXX`
chmod 644 $output_file
echo "scan from $2($device) to $output_file"
# ================================================
# here is the actual scan command:
scanimage --device-name "$device" --mode Black \
--resolution $resolution \
-y 298.00 \
|pnmtops > "$output_file".ps
ps2pdfwr "$output_file".ps "$output_file".pdf
# delete temporary files
rm "$output_file".ps
rm "$output_file"
All documents scanned will show up in a folder named
brscan in your home directory.
Just to mention: since there are four scripts, you might want to have actually different "scan-to-file" settings on the other positions (scan-to-email, scan-to-picture, scan-to-ocr). Which scripts are started with each setting of the scan key is set up in the file
/usr/local/Brother/sane/brscan-key-versionnumber.cfg.
Just edit it to your needs. Have a lot of fun ;-) - and by the way: the DCP-7010 is really a good model, if you want to have a quite good laser printer and copier and no space on your desk for an additional scanner.
Update:
The same procedure works for a MFC-7820N (connected via USB) on Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.10. Follow the instructions on
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/ - you'll need to put
/usr/bin/brscan-skey in the Autostart for every user who shall be able to use the scan key options. With the script above, unfortunately, the Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) doesn't work. You can however use it with Xsane: you'll just have to put the number of pages you want to scan in the upper left corner of the main field of Xsane.
2nd Update:
The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) actually works with a slightly modified script, as has been posted
here.
