[sane-devel] TWAIN 2.0 targetting Linux

[Wolfram Heider]

Hello,

in my view and daily work experiience the initial idea of having something 
which makes life easier for the common scanning guy is of undisputable sex 
appeal. Since even if you ever stay in the same distro with ever the same 
scanner you have steadily to fiddle around from versionnumber to 
versionnumber to get the damned little thing running anew. Much worse it is 
if you have to install various scanners in constantly changing environments; 
then you will have to invest huge amounts of working time in reconfiguring 
the whole scanner stuff from version to version (especially notorious SuSE 
with a design of boot scripts and a folder tree never coming to a rest). You 
will have to read a lot. SANE documentation is excelllent and with its help 
and that from this list you will  fix almost everthing (okay trouble with 
your mother-in-law maybe not entirely). But for the normal windowser (i.e. 
the normal pc-user) and even for many of the windows used sysadmins this is 
the pure horror (TCO- eh?). They simply won't read any more. They just want 
to click.
However I doubt if the cohabitation of SANE and TWAIN could be a solution for 
this. Probably it would only taint the coherence of the solid SANE code 
indeed. And most likely it would  just be good for raising the confusion.
Seen from the angle of common usability, I imagine, it could be better to have 
something like a general installer which would do all the system- and 
distrospecific setup, the rights management and so on. This could be done by 
a script (a rather big script admittedly) which had to consider appropriately 
the different administrative structures of the different OSes (Windows95 et 
al/NT et al; Mac OSX/pre OSX and in the realm of Linux mainly Redhat and 
SuSE-like distros on the one and the debian breed on the other hand. I knew 
this would demand  some hardheaded guys with a pretty wide view and a rapid 
reaction steadily on the alert to encounter the recent changes in OS 
software. Maybe it's just a dream. But I dream it almost every day when I 
have to get  running a scanner (or serveral) somewhere out there. 

Regards
Wolfram Heider


Am Dienstag, 11. Oktober 2005 22:51 schrieb Philipp Schmid:

> Brian J Densmore schrieb:
> >Maybe it's time
> >
> >
> >someone works on making TWAIN applications for Linux?
>
> Hello,
>
> I think SANE is currently a very powerful API with the big advantage that
> all frontends (and linux scanner applications) are able to work with all
> (linux)backends. If we have some backends or drivers that only work with
> TWAIN applications we loose this big advantage of the SANE API on the linux
> platform.
>
> So I think the only reasonable thing we could do is to devel one general
> SANE backend that is able to work with all TWAIN-drivers. But I'm not a man
> of TWAIN and I can't say if this is theoretical possible and how much time
> would be necessary to devel such a backend.
>
> I see that a lot of problems about TWAIN have been written down in this
> list and so I think this could only be a temporary solution until a SANE
> backend is develed for the currently unsupported scanners.
>
> philipp