[sane-devel] Pixma future

[Andrea Croci]

On 24.11.20 21:00, Ralph Little wrote:
> One way to deal with that would be for me to add Lineart as a filter
> to xsane as a postprocess option.
> Command line users could make the lineart conversion another phase of
> their workflow, using a tool like imagemagick.
> I think that a lot of people view this kind of thing as something that
> the frontend should provide, with the backend merely exposing the
> native capabilities of the hardware. We have a number of backends
> doing emulation of functions that the hardware cannot do and they all
> seem to do it in their own special way, increasing the code size
> measurably.
>
> Which reminds me, I really need to get back to xsane. I'm a terrible
> one for distraction :(
>
> Cheers,
> Ralph

May I just quickly chirp in? I'm not involved in the development of
this, but I would like to express my opinion from the point of view of a
user, for what it's worth.

1) I do agree that the backend should merely expose the native
capabilities of the hardware. However if you are having one backend for
a lot of similar, but not identical, machines, then it may be that some
of these machines do offer lineart scanning natively and others don't. I
think the backend that covers all these machines should offer the
superset of the hardware capabilities, instead of the subset, which
would reduce the whole machine family to the smallest set of features
offered.

2) I may be the only one, but since I got tired of chasing the problem
that's keeping xsane from working in my Ubuntu 18.04 computer (it works
great in the 20.04), I am forced to scan from command line. I do use
another tool like imagemagick to postprocess my scans (convert the .tiff
to .pdf) and, when I'm scanning from ADF, even use tiffcp to convert the
single tiffs into a multipage tiff before using convert to do the pdf. I
have to admit that I don't like it a lot.

   If on the one hand I agree that the backend should do just the
backend, I on the other hand would like to have a tool that does the
whole thing for me without having to use three programs. I know this
tool should be xsane, but then it should also compress the pdfs better
(back when it was working it generated huge pdfs). I have always
wondered why the Windows programs make a 180 kB pdf of the same page for
which xsane made a 7MB file (don't know if it has changed in the last
few years since I'm scanning from command line).

Sorry, it was not so quick after all.

Cheers, Andrea