[sane-devel] Infrared channel

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.de> writes:

> On Feb 22 17:23 Gerhard Jaeger wrote (shortened):
>> On Tuesday 22 February 2005 16:21, Johannes Meixner wrote:
>> > Perhaps it is possible to "misuse" the PPD file syntax for scanner
>> > setup as well.
>> 
>> You are right, but I don't like the idea to "misuse" something,
>> especially it has a spec consiting of 186 pages ;)
>
> Don't get confused by the length of the PPD spec.
> The spec of the plain PPD syntax is small.
> Most in Adobe's PPD spec is description about very printer
> specific stuff (which keywords should be used and so on ...).
>
>> But we should really create some unique database, somehow
>> automagically, where every backend puts it's information
>> and options to in a well defined way.
>
> I didn't dare to ask for this.

What you are suggesting here sounds quite a bit to the way foomatic
handles printers.

  - an XML database
  - a few utilities to crank out PPD files
  - one utility to glue the PPDs, the spooler and the printer drivers
    together

I guess, we could do without the PPD files for scanners because there
is no established standard yet.  Anyway, with all the info in an XML
database, converting to *.desc or *.conf or ... is just a matter of
writing the right XSL style sheet.

See http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html for details.

> Obviously it is best not to maintain any kind of text files
> but to run the backend in a special mode and the backend spits out
> what it knows in a well defined format.

It be nice if the backend could spit out a baseline because quite a
few backends seem to at least partially support new models without any
modification.  As a matter of fact, I have been playing with the
thought to externalise a lot of data that is now hard-coded in the
epkowa backend into data files.  This would make it possible to add
support for at least some scanners without a recompile of the backend.
# If the original data is in XML format, it would also ease keeping my
# (internal) specs in sync with reality ;-)

Just my two yen,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                            EPSON KOWA Corporation, PF1
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