The question pretty much says it all. I basically want to create a driver that is compatible with my current MacOS (Catalina). The issue I'm facing is that my printer (with scanner) currently will only scan pages and print them out. I'd like to be able to use my scanner to save an image of a scanned document.
I'm honestly not sure if writing a driver is the best way to do this but the manufacturer (Canon) no longer has drivers for this old scanner. But it works just as well as the day we got it so I REALLY don't want to have to toss this one out and buy a new one.
UPDATE: currently stuck with the following:
rabdelazin@rabdelazim Downloads % device=$(sane-find-scanner | awk '/Canon/{print $NF}')
rabdelazin@rabdelazim Downloads % echo $device
libusb:020:029
rabdelazin@rabdelazim Downloads % scanimage --device Canon:$device -x 210 -y 297 --mode color --resolution 240 --format=tiff --depth 8 > ~/Downloads/scan.tiff
scanimage: open of device Canon:libusb:020:029 failed: Operation not supported
Well after a LOT of trial and error, I've finally come up with a solution.
TL;DR: I made a print server out of a raspberry-pi and installed cups and set the printer to be shared through the server. Works like a charm!
It took quite a bit of investigation but as part of reviving an old laptop, I got it running by installing Ubuntu 20.04. Just for kicks I decided to try and print something from the laptop. I had to install CUPS and maybe a few other packages but it worked. That got me thinking that I should just make a print server that knows how to talk to the printer so all the other machines can come and go but my printer should still work.