Hi Oliver...
Many thanks for your reply.
I'm glad that you also see a benefit from this interaction between
SANE and TWAIN. The fact that TWAIN's user base is expressing
an interest in UNIX is a little daunting in some ways, since not many
of the current TWAIN members are doing anything with UNIX.
So one of the opportunities we see from working with SANE is a
chance to draw on your experience and expertise.
As stated in my first message, I believe the principle benefit from
SANE and TWAIN working together is a chance to help app
writers cross from one OS to the other with less effort than it takes
today. So, TWAIN runs on UNIX, SANE runs on Windows, and
application writers have one less component to worry about
when trying to build their source code on an alternate platform.
Bearing that in mind, I propose that on UNIX TWAIN runs in
communication with a generic Source that talks to SANE drivers.
We would have to make some minor changes to our Source
Manager to allow this to work properly, but such a TWAIN Source
would be able to communicate with any SANE supported image
capture device.
At this time I don't believe there is much to be gained from having
a generic SANE driver that talks to TWAIN. Technically it is very
doable, but TWAIN Sources have a history of relying heavily or
even exclusively on their internal GUIs, which doesn't fit well into
SANE's programmatic design. We are working to change this
behavior (and have been since TWAIN 1.7 -- 1997), so in the
future it might be advantageous to do this.
One question I have regarding SANE has to do with writing drivers
for mulitple UNIX platforms. Writing a 'single' device driver for
Solaris and AIX and Linux, etc must be appealing to some device
manufacterers (nobody wants to have write one driver per OS for
their device). Has SANE investigated an abstraction between
it's interface and the actual communication with the OS? I'm kind of
looking for something like ASPI (though wire independent). The
idea being that me, as a driver writer, would be able to write a
SANE driver that with a minimum of #ifdef's would be buildable on
UNIX or Macintosh or Windows platforms.
If such a mechanism could be created, I would have a very good
reason for running SANE on Windows and Macintosh platforms...
Mark McLaughlin
Eastman Kodak Company
716 726 1352
mlm@kodak.com
Oliver Rauch <oliver.rauch@wolfsburg.de> on 08/11/99 01:01:30 PM
To: sane-devel@mostang.com, "McLaughlin, Mark" <mlm@kodak.com>
cc: (bcc: Mark McLaughlin/252353/EKC)
Subject: Discussion about SANE and TWAIN...
252353N@knotes.kodak.com wrote:
> From: Mark McLaughlin
>
> Hello...
>
> My name is Mark McLaughlin, and I am the current Chairperson
> on the TWAIN Working Group Technical Sub-committee. I am
> sending this message to the manager for the SANE website in
> the hope that it will reach the appropriate people.
>
> There is growing interest (as viewed on our mailing list) for
> seeing TWAIN support on UNIX platforms, particularly on Linux.
> This interest has finally reached a level where the TWAIN
> Working Group feels it needs to investigate the possibility of
> adding support for UNIX.
>
> We are interested in this because we believe there is an
> opportunity to help developers of image capture systems
> on UNIX, WIN32 and Macintosh platforms leverage their
> code run on one or more or the alternate platforms.
>
> TWAIN has no intention of competing with SANE. Rather we
> wish to investigate a chance to employ the strengths of both
> standards. We are not against the idea of seeing SANE
> running on WIN32 or Macintosh platforms, and if there are
> ways we can help SANE achieve this we would be happy to
> discuss them. It is important that both groups benefit from any
> interaction.
>
> We would like to start a dialog with one or more members of the
> SANE group to discuss this further. Please feel free to respond
> directly to me, or to the TWAIN Working Group as a whole
> (twain-wg@twain.org); whichever you feel to be more apropriate.
Hello,
we are interested in the discussion about making available TWAIN
on UNIX/linux and the coexistence of TWAIN and SANE on
the same operating systems.
I think there are a lot of thing both projects can benefit from.
It also is interesting to see if it makes sense/is possible
to make both standards work with each other
(e.g. create a sane-backend that connects to TWAIN devices
or to create a TWAIN device driver that makes available
the devices supported by SANE, etc.).
At first I have to take a closer look at the TWAIN standard to
know what we are talking about.
I will cc my mails to the sane-devel mailling list (so we can keep the
discussion open for the people who are involved or interested in the
sane development ). I will send the mails directly to you. If you like to
I will also cc my mails to twain-wg@twain.org.
Bye
Oliver Rauch
-- EMAIL: Oliver.Rauch@Wolfsburg.DE WWW: http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch
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