[sane-devel] Advanced options

[Ralph Little]

Hi,

On 2020-03-07 11:53 p.m., Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
> Maybe, maybe not. For the backends/scanners where these are marked as
> advanced, is there another less-advanced way to set the scan area?
> For example by choosing a paper size like A4 or Letter.  If there is, I
> think I would classify the well-known scan area options as advanced too.
>
> # Never mind that A4 is of course extremely ill-defined as a scan area.
> # There's neither orientation nor offset information :-/
>

I had not considered this possibility.
However, in the examples that I looked at, this was not the case.
> Given that there might be less-advanced ways of setting the scan area,
> mandate might be a bit too strong but we could recommend something of
> course :-)
>

It might be that the developers of those backends were primarily testing 
with xsane.
xsane doesn't really care that those options are "advanced" and picks up 
their availability regardless to support the preview capability.
If you are selecting an area to scan using the preview area, then it 
would seem that the "manual" options are irrelevant.

However, if you are using scanimage, it makes less sense. Unless you use 
the -A option, you wouldn't even see them. :(
For much of my overview testing, I'm using xsane. However for the more 
automated test sequences, I'm exclusively using scanimage.
For some of those scanners, the output of scanimage -h is very sparse 
indeed.

"Advanced" for me indicates that the options would only be interesting 
to more specialised uses. Selecting an area to scan seems to me to be 
rather common.

Cheers,
Ralph