Re: Scanner

[" Raymond A. Ingles" <inglesra@frc.com>]

On Sun, 11 Jan 1998, Pure Energy wrote:

> On 9 Jan 1998, Ben Gertzfield wrote:

> > TWAIN is a joke. All "TWAIN compliant" means is that it comes with
> > drivers for Windows.
> 
> 	I have a Scantastic scanner which uses the "TWAIN compliant"
> drivers. This scanner doesn't have a SCSI interface but an ISA interface
> card. Does the Sane drivers/software detect ISA or only SCSI? 

 Well, it depends on exactly what the ISA card is. It may be an el-cheapo 
SCSI card, in which case, if Linux supports it, so does SANE. Sometimes 
it's just a special parallel port. I think there's work going on to 
support something like that.

 If it's some totally proprietary interface, almost certainly it isn't 
supported yet. You could try to contact Scantastic (or whoever makes the 
scanner) and get interface information. Then, you could write a driver 
yourself or maybe convince someone else to do it.

> 	With the growing popularity of the "cheaper" scanners (199.99 and
> less) which use these "TWAIN compliant" drivers i would think that
> something would be designed to use them in the Linux community.

 The problem is that TWAIN is a *Windows* standard. It's more a standard 
about the device driver software, not the device itself. Thus, it's 
basically useless under another operating system.

 There is only one way that TWAIN could be useful. SANE is working on 
being able to use a scanner over a network. That is, you could put the 
scanner on one computer and run the scanning software on another 
computer. There is some investigation of running a bit of SANE software 
under Windows that uses the TWAIN interface to talk to the scanner. Then, 
a networked Linux box could talk to the Windows PC and operate the 
scanner remotely. This isn't useful if you only have one PC, or two PCs 
and no network, though.

 BTW, SANE's URL: "http://www.mostang.com/sane/";

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles          (248) 377-7735         ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com

 "The meek can *have* the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!"
                       - Robert A. Heinlein


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