Re: [Gnumed-devel] packaging help needed - TWAIN, XSANE, SANE

[Jim Busser]

On 30-Aug-09, at 10:32 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> TWAIN is a strange beast: It is a low
> level API to a high level user interface. The vendor TWAIN
> drivers have gotten very sophisticated including a GUI to
> control scanning etc.
>
> > What does a user experience when on Windows twainmodule was loaded?
>
> A vendor-specific GUI opens which ranges from crap to
> deluxe.

So... if (via Windows twainmodule) it is a vendor-specific GUI that  
opens, how is that different than just using the vendor's front-end  
GUI independently?

... does the vendor GUI still write the file (even if only temporarily  
into some \temp directory) to disk?

... whether or not an image file is written to disk, does twainmodule  
have access to either the object in memory and/or the name and  
location of any file(s) that were saved, permitting GNUmed to  
automagically list the part(s) in the "Attach documents" plugin's  
"Parts" display area?

> > Does this result in the opening-up of a standard WIndows default
> > client
>
> ROTFLOL. Standard Windows default client ?  ;-)

Always happy to provide comic relief, even if it might have been half- 
knowingly. I guess I wasn't (and am not) too worried :-)

Half of me *was* remembering that when I opened JPGs or TIFFs on an  
unaltered Windows box, some kind of generic image browser opened  
(although I did not watch closely, and I suppose it could have been an  
Adobe plugin).

I did imagine that in the same way as Apple provides "Image Capture"  
that Windows might ship with something that could access a TWAIN  
scanner despite that the scanner vendor could still supply software  
that would overwrite a Windows preference and/or the scanner's driver  
might preferentially call.