The Discussion:
Dennis led us into the topic of printing in Linux. He has a Brother printer that requires the manufacturers driver, at least for Windows. We diverted into PPD files and the CUPS printer utilities. Just to be sure this model is covered, Carl ran “pamac search mfc-j480dw” and pamac responded with:
brother-mfc-j480dw 1.0.0-0 AUR CUPS and LPR drivers for the Brother MFC-J480DW printer
So it is save to assume that this driver is available for most Linux distros.
We then talked about scanner software, and the consensus was xsane is the one use. And for Optical Character Resolution (OCR) tesseract shines. There are also convenient scanner/OCR apps available on android.
Richard then filled us in on his favorite reader app. Readera provides a convenient way read pretty much any kind of document without requiring proprietary software. Among its features is the ability to read aloud in any of several voices. This could be quite nice on a long road trip!