ScanTailor Advanced for Mac: The Honest Guide

Let’s start with the fact most download sites will not tell you plainly: there is no official ScanTailor Advanced build for macOS. The project’s GitHub releases publish a Windows ZIP and Linux packages — no .dmg, no .pkg, no Universal Binary, nothing for the Mac published by the developers. Any website offering you a ready-made “ScanTailor Advanced for Mac” installer download is not offering you something the project made.

That does not mean Mac users have no options. It means the options are different from a normal download, and this page lays them out honestly.

Option 1: Build From Source

ScanTailor Advanced is open source under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and the code is public on GitHub. The project’s README documents the build and points to the companion libraries repository used to build it. Building from source is the path the project itself supports, but be clear about what it involves: a development toolchain, fetching and building dependencies, and compiling the application yourself. It is a reasonable afternoon project for someone comfortable with a terminal and developer tools; it is not a one-click install, and this site will not pretend otherwise.

Option 2: The Community Homebrew Tap (Unofficial)

A third party maintains a Homebrew tap — yb85/homebrew-tap — that packages a from-source build of ScanTailor Advanced for Homebrew users. Understand exactly what this is:

• It is a community effort. It is not provided, maintained or endorsed by the ScanTailor Advanced developers.
• It does not give you a pre-built official binary — Homebrew still compiles the program from source on your machine; the tap just automates the recipe.
• Because it is unofficial, review what the tap does before you rely on it, and expect that problems with the tap itself are the tap maintainer’s, not the project’s.

The download page links the project’s repository and notes this option alongside the official downloads.

Option 3: Process on Another Machine

If building from source is more than you want to take on, the pragmatic route many Mac users take is to do the post-processing where an official build exists: run the Windows portable build on a Windows PC, or the Linux build on a Linux machine, and simply move the scan files back and forth. ScanTailor projects and image files are ordinary files — you can capture and archive on your Mac and process on the other machine. Virtual machines are another general way people run Windows or Linux software from a Mac; what works best depends on your Mac and setup.

About the “Unidentified Developer” Message

Software you build yourself, or obtain outside the Mac App Store, is typically not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS Gatekeeper may say it “cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer”. This is normal for self-built open-source software. The standard macOS way past it is to open System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the blocked app message, and choose Open Anyway. Only ever do this for software you built yourself or obtained from a source you have verified — the warning exists for a reason, and it is a strong reason to be skeptical of pre-built “Mac versions” offered by random download sites.

What Not To Do

Do not download a supposed ScanTailor Advanced .dmg from a third-party download portal. None is published by the project, so there is no official checksum to verify such a file against, and repackaged “Mac installers” of popular free software are a well-known malware channel. The safe rule: if it does not come from the project’s GitHub — source code, or the official Windows and Linux binaries — it is not an official ScanTailor Advanced release.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there an official ScanTailor Advanced .dmg for Mac?

No. The project publishes no macOS binary at all — no .dmg, no Universal Binary, no Apple Silicon build. The official releases cover Windows (portable ZIP) and Linux (AppImage and .deb).

Is the yb85 Homebrew tap official?

No. It is a community-maintained, unofficial tap that automates building ScanTailor Advanced from source via Homebrew. It is not provided or endorsed by the project’s developers.

Can ScanTailor Advanced run on Apple Silicon (M-series) Macs?

There is no official build for Apple Silicon or Intel Macs. The only Mac routes are building from source yourself, the unofficial Homebrew tap (also a source build), or processing your scans on a Windows or Linux machine.