Re: quick note from the TWAIN/SANE meeting at OLS

From: Oliver Rauch (oliver.rauch@Wolfsburg.DE)
Date: Fri Aug 04 2000 - 02:00:39 PDT

  • Next message: Oliver Rauch: "Re: Code freeze for 1.0.3"

    Hi David,

    at first let me say thanks that you found the time for the meeting with the
    TWAIN people and for representing the SANE project.

    > ---there will need
    > to be one GUI frontend for each major toolkit in use (Motif, GTK, Qt,
    > Win32 come to mind). If TWAIN-on-SANE is done properly, it should be
    > possible to "plug in" a different GUI frontend relatively easily
    > (perhaps not on the fly, but at least through simple recompilation).

    I agree. I don`t see any problems if we have a gtk, a qt, a motif ---
    or should be we better talk about windows systems: a X11, a WIN32, a GGI
    and a text based frontend.

    A lot can be covered by qt and gtk wich run on X11 and WIN32.

    Like xsane already shows it is no great problem to port a frontend
    written for unix/X11+gtk to run on Windows+gtk.

    > Mark and Jon offered to start working on a prototype for
    > TWAIN-on-SANE. I offered them help with constructing a GUI builder
    > based on our existing GTK frontends (probably xsane).

    The main problem is - I think - the definition of the inter-process-comunication
    between the application and the sane-frontend.

    Did you discuss that, were there any suggestions?

    > Also, Mark and Jon said that the scanner vendors really like to be
    > able to customize the look of the scanner GUI.

    I think in the moment each scanner vendor does write it's own GUI.
    So if they want to have a totally different look they are free to write
    their own GUI.

    > Slightly fancier would be to have a simple language that
    > would control how and where each SANE option gets laid out in the
    > device dialog. Of course, a driver vendor could also feel free to
    > implement a GUI from scratch if they want full customization, but that
    > would be a fair amount of work. I think some level of scriptability
    > would provide a very good tradeoff between custom look and a uniform
    > user experience.

    It should be simple to change the gtk-style-settings in dependance of the backend.
    (and to add a logo).
    We also could add an info field (sane2.0) to the options that gives the backend the
    chance to e.g. requests that a range is displayed as slider or text-entry-field, ...
    but already this can make it hard for the frontend to create a good looking outfit.

    Bye
    Oliver

    --
    Homepage:       http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch
    sane-umax:      http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch/sane/sane-umax.html
    xsane:          http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch/sane/sane-xsane.html
    E-Mail:         mailto:Oliver.Rauch@Wolfsburg.DE
    

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