Early last week I finally did the Brother Printer software update Apple had been offering for some weeks. Next time I wanted to scan something into an email, neither Image Capture nor PDF Pen could 'see' the scanner! Printing was fine from both Judy's MBP and my iMac. Swapped several Brother files from a known good date from Time Machine, no help. Renamed three different plist files, for Brother and Image Capture, nothing. After manually typing in some text yesterday, because I couldn't scan it and use the OCR function of PDF Pen, I decided it was time for
ACTION!.
I somehow remembered that the scanning function relied on TWAIN and found a TWAIN file in the Brother's folders in /Library/Printers. It was dated back in early 2009, nothing seemed to have been updated in that file for many months. Still...those dates sometimes don't change properly with an update. Looked at the date info at a known operational version in TM and could see no obvious difference. With no fear of ruining a perfectly inoperative scanner, I replaced the current version with the TM one.
Restart, open Image Capture, 'wah-
LAH!' There's the old faithful, if not too fancy Brother scanner! Don't know why, don't know why, don't know when! All I know or care about is that it works, again!
Next time your scanner 'hides,' check/swap/replace/restore any TWAIN files before running around like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers!
