Epscape

by Colin Whittle

Epscape is a program that drives Epson scanners from RISC OS computers. The current version supports computers and scanners connected by their bi-directional parallel interfaces, which means it will only work with the following Epson GT series scanners:
1000, 4000, 5000, 6000, 6500, 8000, 8500, 9000, 9500
and the following Acorn machines:
A3010, A3020, A4000, A5000, A7000, A7000+ and Risc PC

Epscape will work on RISC OS 3.10 and later, although RISC OS 3.50 (or later) has the extra ability of being able to display scans directly on screen. RISC OS 3.1 computers can still save scans to disc. ChangeFSI (as supplied by Acorn) recognises all the file formats involved.

Using Epscape
Use the RISC User disc menu system, or double-click on the !Epscape icon, to load the program.

The first thing to do is to check the Options dialogue box. The Interface must be set to Parallel in this version of Epscape. Interactive help can be turned off, if not required, to speed responses. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) file quality can be adjusted as required. The generally agreed norm is 75%. If this is the first time you have used Epscape with this combination of computer and scanner, the Choices must be set to Default. However, once Epscape has been initialised, the User setting can be selected, and this will enable your preferred settings to be saved.

Epscape is initialised by clicking with Select on its icon on the icon bar. A window will appear containing three panes; Format, Area and Scan. Format will be the foreground pane but Area or Scan can be selected by clicking on their respective tabs.

Format allows settings to be made for colour output and correction, gamma correction, brightness and sharpness. Note that, with Epson scanners, if the gamma correction is set to User defined then any brightness setting is ineffective. On all the other gamma correction settings, the brightness is effective.

Area allows the DPI (Dots Per Inch), scaling and size of the scan to be set. The DPI settings displayed are those for the particular scanner model in use. The scan dimensions can be in either inches or millimetres.

Scan controls the actual scanning process, and whether the image is sent directly to the screen or to disc. Note that when scanning to disc it isnecessary to drag the file icon to a directory viewer, to indicate where it is to be saved. A prompt will appear to this effect. Epscape will save to floppy disc if the image is small enough but a hard drive is to be recommended!

See your Epson Scanner User Guide for more information on the various settings.

Hint
Try using three-pass scanning, as opposed to colour line scanning. It cuts out the scanner's colour correction, and you may actually find this preferable. It is also less prone to producing moir patterns when scanning printed matter. Three-pass scanning is selected by using 16 million colours and None for colour correction. (If any other value is chosen for colour correction, the scanner will automatically revert to colour line scanning.)

Copyright  RISC User magazine 1998
