On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:00:12 -0800 , David Mosberger-Tang
<David.Mosberger@acm.org> wrote:
> Manuel> The number of settable options has got so long that the
> Manuel> xscanimage window is too high to fit on my screen
> Manuel> (1024x768). Is there any solution for this? I saw that other
> Manuel> backends like Mustek or Umax also have lots of options. How
> Manuel> do they look like, then?
>
> Umh, that sounds bad. Are all those options really needed?
Well, the scanner supports them so my opinion is that the driver should
support them too. It's up to the user to decide whether to make use of
them or not. In *my* case as a user I can assure you I want to *be able*
to control every possible aspect of my scanner (which doesn't mean I want
to tweak every control every time I scan something). In fact my original
motivation for extending the existing Canon driver was that I missed some
options I *needed*, e.g. being able to eject the slide after scanning.
> I suspect a user interface as complex as this would be confusing to
> first time users anyhow, no? Anyhow, you could use "advanced" options
> to hide some of the less frequently used options.
I agree that a complex user interface is confusing to first time users.
Making some options not available at all is not the solution, though:
this reduces *all* users to the category of "first time users".
Hiding some less-frequently used options under some "advanced" dialog
is fine, and that is what I tried to do at first. But even if I do that,
whenever I choose "Show advanced options" in xscanimage the window gets
too high to fit on my screen, so I am left with the original problem.
> A more general solution would be to go back to using a GTK notebook so
> you can select different pages of options. However, back when we had
> that, I did not like it very much because its awkward if you can't see
> all relevant options on a single page.
It is only awkward if you want to use all the options. It is not awkward
if you are a first time user wanting to use only the simple options.
Anyway, even if it is awkward, there is no way around some solution of
this sort because having a window too high to fit on the screen, *that*
is awkward.
I will have a look at Oliver Rauch's new frontend as soon as it comes out.
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