Privilege issue with UMAX scanner software

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Level 1

116 points

Privilege issue with UMAX scanner software

We're using UMAX MagicScan 4.5 software with a UMAX PowerLook 2100 XL scanner, hooked up to a G3 running OS 9.2 and Photoshop 6.

Problem in a nutshell is that when the student account had limitations on it, we get an error message when we try to preview our scan. It will scan, just won't let us preview it. Message says (paraphrased) not enough disk space, try scanning at a smaller size. Same message appears whether we attempt to scan directly through MagicScan or by importing through Photoshop. However, when I remove the limitations from the student account, voilá! It works like a dream. The student account does however need limitations.

Have tried installing software logged in as student and sent support request to UMAX, who after some emails back and forth, suggested that I contact Apple since it seems to be a permissions issue.

Any ideas? Anyone else run into the same, or similar problem and knows a fix? Many thanks in advance.

Posted on Oct 10, 2005 4:03 PM

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Answer 1

Ron JACKLE

Level 7

33,451 points

Oct 10, 2005 7:27 PM in response to PrintTech

PrintTech...

With the "not enough disk space" error, I believe non-administrator accounts have a size limit on the "write" portion. Scanned images I believe uses .tif rather than .jpg as a default of which seems to generate larger scanned images or files. Maybe a preference change is in order to work around that. Lower DPI settings?

...Ron

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Answer 2

PrintTech Author

Level 1

116 points

Oct 11, 2005 5:56 AM in response to Ron JACKLE

I'm not sure that's our problem. Students are able to scan and save hi-res tiffs; they just can't preview them unless all restrictions are removed. But lowering our resolution isn't really an option for us since we need hi-res images for printing. Is there some other preference change you had in mind? I boosted the memory allocated to the scanning software, but that hasn't seemed to help either.

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Answer 3

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Oct 11, 2005 7:18 AM in response to PrintTech

Hi, PrintTech. I'm not familiar with Magicscan, so I may be off-base here.

If you lift the restrictions for testing purposes, then preview a scan, can you find the place on your HD where the preview is stored? Most scanning software that I've seen stores the latest preview image by default in the scanning app itself, in the System Folder, in a preference file, on a scratch disk, or someplace until it's replaced by the next preview image. If your scanning software is trying to store preview images by default in a location where students aren't allowed to write data, that might explain your problem. Magicscan looks at the place where it's set up to save its previews and doesn't see any space it's allowed to use thus the slightly misleading error message.

You can locate the preview temp file (I don't know what its name is likely to be) by previewing an image, quitting the scanning app, immediately opening Sherlock, and searching for all files that have been modified "today". The most recently-modified handful of files will include the one you're looking for. When you find it, check on whether students are authorized to write to that location under normal conditions, and if not, see whether the location can be changed by adjusting a preference in the scanning software. If not, you may want to set things up differently to make that location available to them.

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