[sane-devel] SANE2 proposal

[Nick Lamb]

On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 05:51:21PM -0500, Frank Zago wrote:
> - section 4.3.8
> For SANE FRAME RAW, and possibly others, what is the endianness to use?

For the SANE 1 style raw formats the system native endianness is used for
data, with "reader makes right" rules, so that no unnecessary effort is
used to convert data. Presumably this applies in SANE 2 as well, and it
is probably clearly stated somewhere (I didn't look).

> - Some scanner can find and decode 5 or 10 barcodes per sheet. How can
> such a scanner transfer a decoded barcode? With a MIME type?

Yes, I think the intention of this draft is that you would send one or
more frames of type text/plan or text/xml or something appropriate,
these frames would be very small. I don't agree with the specifics,
but the basic plan is right in the ballpark. Whatever we end up with
will be similar I'm sure.

Once SANE 2 is closer to completion I recommend that a little group
of users + developers who have access to this high end hardware should
get together and decide on the details of how this might work (e.g.
just one frame, or one per barcode? what coding system? use XML or
just plain text?). With an extensible system in the main standard
this application-specific work can be done in parallel.

My suspicion is that this barcode reading functionality may be mostly
used for document IDs. If I'm right (someone who uses this stuff
tell us!) then maybe these should be explicitly made available in
the structure along with the new "suggested filename".

Nick.