My old scanner isn’t recodnized by os x “out off the box”. So I use the great vuescan, which supports a wide range of scanners and is a solid scanning tool with a lot of parameters to adjust the scanning process and the image quality.

But if you just want to make a quick copy of a document it was a bit anoying that you have to handle different applications and to save and reimport the file a couple of times. The best solution would have been a photoshop plugin, TWAIN support for my outdated device.

But there were no drivers from the manufacturer for os x 10.5 and also none for 10.4.

Now I found this project: TWAIN SANE

“This is a TWAIN datasource for MacOS X that aquires images using the SANE backend libraries. The SANE backend libraries provide access to a large range of scanners connected through SCSI or USB.” (from http://www.ellert.se/twain-sane/)

And it just works great.
Download libusb, gettext, SANE backends and TWAIN SANE Interface packages from the website and untar them and ran the package installers.
Thats all!

Now you could open Photoshop (any other app, for example word, should work too) and go to File > Import > Sane.

Choose your scanner if it isn’t chosen by default and get a preview. Adjust the scanning size, correct some color and there you go!

The speed isn’t impressive and the scanner sounds a little different than before, but hey: you can also get the source code and improve this yourself.