[sane-devel] simple-scan problems -- Re: sane_read() and padding bytes

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Michael Nagel <ubuntu at nailor.devzero.de> writes:

> Hello Olaf,

Hi Michael,

> On 13.06.2012 13:51, Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
>> Much to my chagrin, I found out that scanimage and xsane do NOT cope
>> properly with such padded image formats.  Much to my surprise, however,
>> simple-scan does (but has a bunch of problems of in own in terms of
>> being a SANE frontend).  I haven't checked any further.

> I am working on making simple-scan a good program, also from the
> technical point of view.  Could you elaborate the aforementioned
> problems so we can try to solve them?

Let me first say that I realize that simple-scan is first and foremost
meant to be simple.  I also know that many people will only be utterly
confused by presenting them *all* the bell and whistles that a backend
may provide.  However, the preferences and functions that simple-scan
exposes fall way short of what backend implementers did not indicate as
being advanced and blithely ignores the settable values for the few it
does expose.  Furthermore, a feeder is assumed where there may be none.
I just tried scanning "All Pages From Feeder" on a device that doesn't
have one ... looks like it'll scan until my disk is full.  For the same
device, scanning "Front and Back" doesn't seem to make sense (unless it
is also used for something when dashing the acquiring/selected images to
its output destination).

I just noticed that that results in

  ** (simple-scan:3172): WARNING **: scanner.vala:887: Unable to set duplex ADF source, please file a bug

on my terminal but as your main target audience will have started the
application from the menu, they'll never get to see it (the fraction of
people that knows that there is such a thing as ~/.xsession-errors and
actually looks there is infinitesimally small).

I guess what I'm basically trying to say is that it doesn't use the SANE
backend options the way they were meant to be (which isn't easy when you
want to make a simple, intuitive and esthetically pleasing frontend).

Despite all my "compliants", I must say that I kind of like the idea of
organising the images in a document and how you can remove those images
you don't like.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2           FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS CORPORATION
FSF Associate Member #1962               Help support software freedom
                 http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962