[sane-devel] discussion: Future of SANE-project

[Major A]

> I am really confused :)
> I was under the impression that the SANE project was proposing a better alternative to the TWAIN interface. Better, meaning that the backend is written once and is cross platform. That's what I understood from the intro page on the web-site (I pasted part of the intro here for your convenience).

SANE makes it possible to have a frontend work with many different
scanners, thus saving a lot of time and effort for developers. TWAIN
it a simple interface between applications and a scanner
frontend. It's not required for running the scanner, it doesn't save
the developers any time or effort, but is demanded by almost everyone
who buys a scanner for use under Windows or MacOS.

In the long run, we'll have to make something like TWAIN too, but for
the time being, frontends (xscanimage and xsane) have code for
directly interfacing with the GIMP (and maybe others I'm not aware
of). There's no standard interface right now, that's why you can't
scan using SANE directly from within most other graphical
applications.

  Andras