[sane-devel] Film holder control (and adf)

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 09:05:50AM +0000, Jose Paulo Moitinho de Almeida wrote:
> I have been looking at the "best way" to control film holder movement. As far 
> as I could tell in 1.0.6 no backend was supporting this (at least  the 
> coolscan and the canon fs didn't).
> 
> Today I had a look at the coolscan2 project. It allows an option -frame as in:
> 
> scanimage -frame 3

Does this mean "move to frame 3 and then scan an image" or just "move
to frame 3"?

> My proposal is similar, but more elaborate. I think that it could also be 
> arranged so that it facilitates life for adf scanners. Possible commands 
> would be:
> 
> scanimage -number-of-frames
[...]

Looks like all these commands aren't intended to scan something.
However, that's the basic principle of scanimage. If you want to have
these features, I propose to write a new frontend (probably based on
scanimage) which can be added to sane-frontends.

> This interface and an extension in the api would allow a simple integration 
> with other frontends.

The SANE API won't be changed in the current version 1. Maybe this is
an option for version 2. 

I don't understand the idea of some of these options, especially the
options that only return information. However, I don't own a film
scanner so I'm not the right person to judge this.

If I'm completely wrong and the options you described can be set
before a scan as usual, I don't see a problem to implement them as the
normal SANE options.

Bye,
  Henning