Why would a scanner fail on one of two pages?

I have a two-page document that I would like to scan and save as a PDF. Page 1 works, page 2 does not, sometimes.

We have an old Epson Workforce 845 multi-function printer/scanner that has worked well for years. We could print over our LAN and it would send scanned documents back as PDFs. For scanning, the destination computer would be listed on the scanner's control panel so we could tell the scanner where to send the PDF.

About 2 years ago when another member of the family switched from Windows to a Mac, printing still worked, but scanning had to be initiated from the computer. It was no longer listed at the device.

When I upgraded from Win 10 to Win 11, I can still print, but I can no longer get it to scan and transmit documents to me. I tried installing the software that allows the Mac to request a scan, but that didn't work on my Win 11 PC. I even spent at least half an hour on the phone with Epson tech support to no avail. My solution was to ask the Mac user to scan the documents and then email them to me.

Then I discovered that the scanner has an option to save the scanned documents on a USB drive. For the last few months, I have been taking the documents I wanted scanned over to the scanner with a thumb drive. The scanner saves the PDFs on the thumb drive, which I take back to my PC.

No problems until today. I scanned 5-6 documents onto a thumb drive. One of them was a two-page document, which I scanned via the page feeder tray. Back at my PC, Acrobat Reader said the file was corrupted and could not be repaired. All of the other PDFs were fine. I scanned it again with the same result. I then scanned the two pages separately. The first page came through just fine. The second page was corrupted. I retried it 2-3 times. I then asked the Mac user to ask it to be scanned. That worked just fine.

Does anyone have any idea why one page of a two-page document should cause a problem when scanned to a thumb drive, but not when scanned to the Mac?

Have you tried installing the driver on WIn 11 in compatibility mode when it worked properly xp or 7 ?

EDIT : have you seen : https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_workforce_845.html

May need to use a 3rd party driver updater.

Edited by Pkshadow, 04 April 2024 - 08:25 PM.

I just got the email from our Mac user with my scanned document. It's a good copy, but I was shocked by the size. Page 1, which actually has more text, is 369 KB. Page 2, is 2,801 KB. I wonder what that is all about?

Have you tried installing the driver on WIn 11 in compatibility mode when it worked properly xp or 7 ?

It worked properly on Win 10 and XP
 

EDIT : have you seen : https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_workforce_845.html
 
May need to use a 3rd party driver updater.

Thanks for that link. I will check it out.

It's a slim possibility I will admit, but there are anti-counterfeiting technologies built into scanners which will cause certain scans to fail, particularly money, but maybe other things.  Is it possible whatever you're scanning is being detected as something that it shouldn't scan??

Regarding the file size, if it's particularly large compared to other documents, that suggests it's being scanned wholly as an image rather than a mixed or text document.  The PDF for that page will probably consist of a large embedded raster image file, such as a JPEG.

This is a good product for pdf reduction : https://pdfreducer.orpalis.com/  seems Orpalis has been bought up recently.

Older versions below the one I am running now would do Batch Process of a whole folder.  Newest free is 1 dic one compress.

Imagine paid will do the whole folder and more.  Very good compression ratio. Beats Adobe.

It's a slim possibility I will admit, but there are anti-counterfeiting technologies built into scanners which will cause certain scans to fail, particularly money, but maybe other things.  Is it possible whatever you're scanning is being detected as something that it shouldn't scan??

Regarding the file size, if it's particularly large compared to other documents, that suggests it's being scanned wholly as an image rather than a mixed or text document.  The PDF for that page will probably consist of a large embedded raster image file, such as a JPEG.

This is a good product for pdf reduction : https://pdfreducer.orpalis.com/  seems Orpalis has been bought up recently.

Beats Adobe.

EDIT : have you seen : https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_workforce_845.html

VueScan looks like a good option. There is one aspect of the company that I find dishonest. All of their prices end in $.95. Even worse, the number before the decimal point is usually a 9, if not, then a 4. More deception.

• Basic: $24.95, not $25.
• Standard: $49.95, not $50.
• Professional: $119.95, not $120.

This, in my opinion, is a scummy marketing tactic to make people think it's cheaper than it really is. Strike one.

 

 

It's a two-page court document. Page 1, which scanned easily and compactly (is that a word?), has the court stamp, a bar code at the bottom, case numbers, etc. Page 2, which caused the problems, is 75% blank and contains none of that information.
 

I can't think of a reason why it should be problematic then, sorry.

Edited by jonuk76, 04 April 2024 - 10:00 PM.

LOL.

Just put that out for a look.  You would know best if meets your needs and company reviews are useful when look/

I mentioned 3rd party driver updater due to fact that they claim to have a update.   Does not mean have to use it on the whole system.  Is a thought anyway for older stuff.

The Reducer was a good product.  I take it by the name that the company is German (maybe).  It only did reduction what I am running.

Did you try reinstalling it as Win 7 or 10 compatible ?

Ah,,,,, long time since used the program PDF Reducer.  Found I have Ver 1.0.2 from 2013 and I had it set for files instead of by Folder.  Wondered why I could not get Batch File to run...lol

No idea of compression ratio compared to their last version but 2013 still beats Adobe.

Is the document content of a private nature? If not, you could upload the document here to one of us via personal message so we could look at it. I used to work in the prepress industry, so I might recognize what prevented it from being scanned via your PC software.

The term used for the original way you scanned things is "remote scanning" or similar. My Canon copier uses the same function.

W.R.T. your first problem you encountered, does the printer show the Scan to PC option on its display or is it not available there?

Have you tried doing the same thing directly via Epson's scanning software?

As for why the page can be scanned on a Mac, but not a PC, this might give us a clue:

From page 94/95 of the User Guide:

Scan to PC saves your scan as a JPEG file to your computer or as an image capture in Mac OS X 10.6/10.7. • Scan to PC (PDF) saves your scan as a PDF file to your computer or as an image capture in Mac OS X 10.6/10.7.

 

Perhaps the "image capture" method is able to scan things that regular scanning to .jpeg cannot. IOW, it sounds like on a Mac it uses another transmission protocol or method to transfer/process the data.

Many moons ago, when I worked in prepress, I saw situations in which a single text character would prevent a page from scanning. I never did find out why.

Edited by Shplad, 09 April 2024 - 05:18 PM.