[sane-devel] New "SANE" driver, or sort of "Middleware"?

[Mark Dm]

Till, I appreciate your suggestions. I recognize your name from  this and
Printing Mail Lists. I know that you probably know well what you are
talking about. The problem is you are talking over my head. In fact I gave
up on putting anything on github because I am so stupid I do not understand
it . I know how to do what I do and that's about it.
I know I recently did a  new install of Ubuntu and something I installed
was a Snap package. I have no idea what it even means and would have less
of an idea of what to do with it. Just like I want to Build an an Apple M1
binary for the s400w project which supposedly I can do on my Mac, but the
learning curve  for Xcode and Snap together would detract so much from what
I already know how to do, I would get nothing more done on other scanning
related projects.

Mark


On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 1:00 PM Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This form of scanner driver is not a SANE driver but a Scanner
> Application, an emulation of a driverless (in your case eSCL, other
> driverless protocols are WSD and IPP Scan) scanner by software, where
> the emulator communicates with the actual, physical scanner, advertises
> the presence of the scanner via DNS-SD (aka mDNS, Bonjour), and converts
> the standard protocol (eSCL here) into the scanner's proprietary
> protocol (S400W here).
>
> If the Scanner Application is sharing to the network, clients with any
> not too old OS can scan, as modern OSes support driverless scanning. All
> modern network multi-function devices do both driverless printing and
> scanning and so you can use them with any not too old client device.
>
> SANE makes the bridge between SANE frontends (any Linux app which scans)
> and driverless scanners (or Scanner Applications) with the sane-airscan
> backend which currently supports both eSCL and WSD (IPP Scan will be
> added later).
>
> Scanner Applications are the future of scanner driver packaging as they
> allow sandboxed packaging (like Snap and flatpak) of scanner drivers and
> scanning frontends and so distribution-independent driver packages. The
> communication between the two goes via IP with the three driverless
> protocols. Separate sandboxing of frontend and driver with SANE is not
> possible, as the drivers are shared library files to be dropped in a
> defined directory and to be dynamically loaded by the frontend.
>
> In addition Scanner Applications can be joined with Printer Applications
> for multi-function devices.
>
> Mark, you already could make use of this new scanning architecture, by
> sandbox-packaging your Scanner Application and putting it into the
> stores for Snap, flatpak, ... and then every Linux user can simply
> download and install it, regardless of which distro and he can scan on
> the supported scanners. sane-airscan is already included in the standard
> distros and automatically discovers your Scanner Application making the
> supported scanners available to all SANE clients.
>
>     Till
>
>
> On 03/02/2022 16:23, Mark Dm wrote:
> > Ok I have spent a few years making various versions of GUIs and tools
> > for s400w based scanners which include Century CPS-A4WF, Halo Magic
> > Scanner, ION AirCopy, ION AirCopy E-Post Edition, iScan Fly, Kaiser Baas
> > WiFi Photo & Document Scanner, Mustek iScan Air / S400W, Transcription
> > Patri Kun A4 Wi-Fi Portable Scanner. Heretofore referred to collectively
> > as s4000w.  Most of my work has been based around the command line
> > driver for these same units by Bastel
> > https://sites.google.com/site/bast3l78/s400w/main
> > <https://sites.google.com/site/bast3l78/s400w/main>
> >
> > More recently I have worked on Twain2AirScan to allow a Windows Twain or
> > WIA Scanner to be shared over the eSCL protocol.
> >
> > Recently it came to mind to simplify one particular version of something
> > I had previously written. As the Bastel command line driver I use in
> > other projects handles communication to/from s400w scanner, and I had
> > already created an eSCL (AirScan) interface  in PHP the new product is
> > NOT a GUI it is only an eSCL to Bastel s400 bridge. It receives and
> > sends eSCL commands on one side and on the other side sends and
> > receives commands to/from the s400w by way of the Bastel driver.
> >
> > End result? The end result is with the SANE-Airscan backend (not to be
> > confused with the eSCL Back-end)  these s400w scanners now become
> > compatible  with not only SANE , but the same code runs on Mac OSX_64
> > (with included Mac X86-64 Binary ) for native Mac scanning.
> >
> > There are Linux Binaries for x86_32, x86_64, Arm32(Pi 2 & 3). Sorry I
> > have no M1 machine to make an M1 binary and cross-compiling seems
> daunting.
> >
> > This will be added to my http://ScannerShare.com
> > <http://ScannerShare.com> page with Twain2AirScan that allows sharing a
> > Windows TWAIN or WIA Scanner to eSCL/AirScan clients like Mac or Linux,
> > Android, or Linux (using SANE-AirScan)  at http://scannershare.com
> > <http://scannershare.com>. For now however there is no direct link
> > for the new  s400w product but you  can get the file by requesting it at
> > the bottom of the page at http://scannershare.com
> > <http://scannershare.com> Anyone with an s400w scanner and Linux or
> > MacX86_64 is encouraged to test, please.
> >
> > To be clear this solution runs on Apache2 with PHP or other web server.
> > PHP handles all the translation to/from eSCL/BastelS400W. It runs fine
> > on 'localhost' and even supports automatic scanner detection
> > via Bonjour..Avahi. It also simultaneously shares the scanner over your
> > entire network using eSCL/AirScan . You will need a dedicated WiFi
> > interface for the scanner, aside from whatever you use to connect to
> > your normal network/Internet.
> >
> > Mark
> >
>
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