paperease, which at present runs only under Linux, will talk to a Primax Paperease scanner.
I wrote paperease by running the windows 3.1 drivers on a system that recorded all accesses to the parallel port hardware, I did not reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile Primax's drivers. There seem to be several states that the hardware can be left in where it will dissipate a lot of heat - be aware of this and make sure you quit this driver gracefully.
paperease is distributed under the GNU Public License, a copy of which is included in the distribution. This means that there is no warranty for paperease, not even an implied warranty. As you are undoubtedly aware, this means that you are on your own, however badly our code breaks. Note the point about your scanner melting above.
Get the source distribution (as a gzip'd tar file). This includes all the code for paperease, and the documentation.
There is no binary distribution. If you can't compile it (type "make"), you probably aren't clueful enough to use it.
© 2002 James McKenzie.
Primax is probably a trademark of Primax; for all I know, other terms may be trademarks or registered trademarks in some jurisdictions too.
You can read the man page for paperease(1).
The change log is here