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I love Vuescan. The UI could use a bit of polishing, but the software works perfectly. Just don't use the build in OCR function. For some reason it always made many errors compared to OCRmyPDF <https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF>.
Sadly the Vuescan AUR package (unofficial) <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vuescan-bin> breaks several times a week because of sha256sum check miss-match since the developer pushes many silent updates.
Also the developer behind Vuescan is against other downloading options: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-May/0...>
Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)
Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.
However, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.
The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.
It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.