I have been missing a good Open Source scanning application that would be easy to understand (Kooka and XSane don't feel right to me). I first planned to modify libkscan, but I could not figure out the code, so I made my own :)
Glimpse is actually a byproduct while libksane is the main target. For Glimpse, I want to provide easy saving of the scanned images, both providing a save dialog for every scanned image and a possibility to autosave the images in a specific directory.
My goal with libksane is to provide easy access to the most-needed scan parameters, while still giving the possibility to use the advanced (and not so common options) of the SANE backends.
libksane is usable, but can still be tweaked. Things that hopefully make libksane interesting are that it supports 16-bit colors (6 bytes/pixel) and that the UI is (in my opinion) a bit better than that of libkscan. With libksane you can also reach almost all options available from the backends (this is not possible with libkscan).
Things left to do:
- Doxygen documentation is needed :)
- The parameters don't yet have tooltips to explain what they are for.
- The names of the scan options come from the SANE library, so the translation is a problem not yet solved.
- The parameters are now grouped with a dropdown box into basic, advanced and 'All options'. This could be regrouped with a tabbed interface.
I also hope that others will want to use libksane for scanning support in their projects.
As an aside, the name of the application (Glimpse) is found in over 20 milion web pages (Google) and there even is a glimpse.com. It might be that we need another name!