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ICUDesign
ICUDesign
Participant
October 15, 2020
Question

Can't scan

  • October 15, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 223 views

I've got a MacPro Pro running the latest iOS Catalina (10.15.7), Acrobat Pro DC, and an Epson ET-2750 printer/scanner. Every time I try to scan into Acrobat, I run into problems. When I go to scan, I have two options under "select scanner": Epson ET-2750 and Epson ET-2750 (ICA). If I choose the first and click scan, nothing happens. I sit and wait and nothing. But then if I try to do anything, it says that it can't do it because a scanning operation is in process. I have to force quit Acrobat. If I select the second option, at first I got an actual printer dialog box, but then it would do the overview scan but when I tried to actually scan it...nothing. At least this time it let me cancel. Now, when I try I get a message that it "failed to open a session on the device."

 

Printer firmware is up to date. Acrobat is up to date. iOS is up to date. I can scan just fine going through the scanner in System Preferences, but that only allows me to scan one page at a time so I have to then import all the pages into Acrobat and combine them into a single pdf. Extra steps and I have to save a bunch of extra files. Any idea why I can't just scan directly into Acrobat?

 

Thanks!

Bryan

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1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_scCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 15, 2020

Hi Bryan,

 

Let me clear up a very very common misconception: in reality Acrobat cannot scan. Period. What it does do is to use a link to other scanning applications. The Mac system/users has it one better/worse than PC users in that on the PC, there are software links to go to the scanner's software. On the Mac side this was stopped many years ago because it was felt that Twain and other linkage applications provided a bridge to potential software infections. So Apple created their own "Image Capture" which helps you download images from your camera, phone, and also Scans. 

 

The bad news for both PCs and Macs is that for PCs the linkage between Acrobat and the scanner's software is rather tenuous and often breaks. Most commonly it will scan a page and the lock up requiring a force quit of Acrobat (and the loss of the page just scanned). On the Mac side, Image Capture is the worst scanning software I've ever seen. 

 

So, what I would recommend either any PC or Mac user to do is to not scan from within Acrobat but rather to use the software that came with your scanner. And by the way, since you are on Catalina, if you haven't already be sure to set your System Preferences for "Security & Privacy" to make sure that both "Full Disk Access" and "Files and Folders" are given whatever access they need or they will not function properly (or at all). I think that this might be your original problem but I did have to vent to get you toward a better result.

 

If you take my advise (and it's worth a try to see what real scanning software is like), be sure to use the expert settings (not the one-button option that someone made for anyone to scan), and scan into a folder in (say) the Desktop. Then for pages that are to be continuous, drag the lot of them to Acrobat in the Dock. When Acrobat asks if you want all these pages to be in the same document, say yes. It will then convert them to PDF and OCR them. it's painless.

 

For more information on how to do better scanning for clean PDFs see this article I wrote:

http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html

 

Please let me know if this solves your problem

 

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