OmniPage problem with HP scanners and Mac OS 8.5: A reply from Caere

Steve Ross asked Caere a question about problems using the HP Accupage and HP Scan 2 extensions, installed as part of OmniPage Pro 8. This is their response.

You may be out of luck. The "HP Scan 2" driver was written by a company called Pixel Translations. PixTrans (as they're known) was the source for all of our scanner drivers up through Pro 8, where we added TWAIN capability because PixTrans had dropped all support for their consumer scanner drivers.

The problem is that many, if not most, PixTrans drivers die horribly under 8.5. And you can't use TWAIN because HP has never written any TWAIN drivers for the Mac. Since neither PixTrans nor HP have any new Mac support, there's no way to get new drivers for these scanners."

If the drivers do not work with Mac OS 8.5, the suggested work-around was to have an alternate Mac OS 8.1 System Folder, and use that as the startup folder when you need to do scanning.

Update: Richard Frank writes: "I disagree with Caere's statement. The HP DeskScan Driver that HP wrote for their ScanJet Scanners is in fact a TWAIN driver." John Wolf and Gary Held expressed a similar view.

Update: Steve Ross notes that HP Accupage is now built in to DeskScan 2.4, so the separate extension is not needed. The real problem is with HP Scan, as noted above.