TWAIN/WIA driver of Xerox WorkCentre 6515 is *not* professional

[Jim01]

Now, more than 4 months passed by together with a couple of phone calls and emails with Xerox Support. All they said is they look into it. However Xerox keeps silent since a couple of months by now. A status request via email some 4 weeks ago went unanswered. Xerox does not answer.

To all Xerox employees and responsible persons as well as to all members of this community -> THIS IS ABLOSUTELY UNPROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOR OF XEROX.

[Jim01]

Thanks for your reply. I'll look into this image retriever approach. It appears to hamper any office workflow substantially -> walking to the scanner - fiddle with the LUI - walk back to your computer and have Paperport fetch some scan from some preconfigured folder. That's my current impression at least. It's better, though, than jettison the WorkCentre alltogether for the time being.

However, it should be clear to the community that at this time the WorkCentre 6515 is *not* recommendable for standard office applications, viz. scanning black and white documents.

I'll let you know what a call to support with respect to a FER will bring about.

[Joe Arseneau]

As far as I know a FER can only be done via phone calls to support.

Paperport has image retriever specifically to support the SMB/FTP workflow.

Understand, I am only suggesting the workaround to get you by, whether or not you choose to use it is up to you, but I consider a workaround to be much better than to tell you simply that it doesn't work like was done in the past.

[Jim01]

>>Probably cheaper and easier and certainly faster to switch to scanner from the device to an FTP server or SMB share which certainly will allow you to make the required change.<<

Standard office workflows engage dedicated document management systems, such as Paperport or Filecenter. Such dedicated scanning software require TWAIN/WIA drivers. Scannig from the device to an FTP server or SMB share just does not cut it.

I am very much under the impression that the responsible Xerox managers are not aware of the recommendations given by Adobe professionals - the Adobe link was not communicated to your support colleagues at the time.

I'd be happy to file a FER (Feature Enhancement Request), which may help Xerox design more professional products. Do you have s.th. like an email address or phone number of your FER colleagues?

Please advice how to proceed in that respect.

[Joe Arseneau]

My apologies, but this forum is peer-to-peer and not monitored by Xerox support officially.

I happen to be a 2nd level rep, and answer a lot of stuff here un-officially, but if you got through 2nd level to Engineering and they declined to fix it, there is no other avenue to use.

Your only option at that point is to do a FER (Feature Enhancement Request), which is still through calling Xerox, but instead of reporting the matter as broken, you are requesting a feature be added, and again, there would be no guarantee it would get implemented unless you actually paid them to develop the feature.

Probably cheaper and easier and certainly faster to switch to scanner from the device to an FTP server or SMB share which certainly will allow you to make the required change.

[Jim01]

Thanks for your reply - yet I have already addressed this issue to support -> 3rd level support declined to come up with a fix, because "the driver works as designed". That's a management issue. I can't believe Xerox designs unprofessional products.

I came to this forum here to have this issue hopefully properly escalated.

[Joe Arseneau]

Call in to the support site and report your issue/findings so they can decide if they will proceed with a fix.

[Jim01]

The Xerox TWAIN/WIA driver of the WorkCentre 6515 does support black and white scans with “Text/Photo” mode only. The scans use dithering, which is ok for photos, but is *not* ok for text documents. Dithering scans of Text documents produce text with interspersed white speckles in text letters. Text in general appears rather grayish/white instead of black and white.  

The local user interface (LUI) does support scans in plain vanilla “Text mode” and will provide improved quality when scanning text documents compared to using "text/photo" setting.

Currently, the "Text mode" option is *not* available with the TWAIN/WIA driver.

The Adobe Acrobat Support pages -> (https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/scan-documents-pdf.html) emphasize:

• “Scanning tips: Avoid dithering or halftone scanner settings. These settings can improve the appearance of photographs, but they make it difficult to recognize text. “

Whereas the WorkCentre 6515 does support plain vanilla black and white scanning via LUI setting "Text mode", the current WorkCentre TWAIN/WIA driver supports black and white scanning with dithering only, i.e. corresponding to a LUI "Text/Photo" setting.

Thus, the current design of the WorkCentre 6515 TWAIN/WIA driver does not conform to the Adobe recommendations, making it difficult to have the Xerox WorkCentre 6515 work properly together with an industry standard legacy product, viz. Adobe Acrobat or other OCR applications.

The Xerox WorkCentre 6515 may safely be characterized as currently actively hampering professional office applications.

I’d appreciate a comment with respect to plans to amend the 6515 TWAIN/WIA driver, such that it supports a black and white “Text mode” as well.

Thanks