GNOME Scan

Hi everybody,

I was away the past week and did not work very much on Gnome Scan. I met with Lionel Dricot and Raphaël Slinkx at Louvain-la-Neuve. Funny I’m just back to home and checking out mails, RSS, and such.

Weekly Report

The past two weeks were busy on various improvements in Gnome Scan, particularily printing (using GtkPrint). I added the codebase to handle multiple actions (mail to come soon). That’s not that easy since GtkPrint is not flawless for use in such special case : configure scan and print ; acquire and print. It’s more used for a workflow like configure>scan>configure>print.

Final Report

No doubt this Soc has been ful of new features and improvements for Gnome Scan, however, there is place for lot of development.

The bad

• I still didn’t reach the 0.6 stage (i.e. all feature from Gnome Scan 0.4.1 reimplemented).
• No real processing at all (rotation, deskew, gamma, etc.). I would like to use CPU only where hardware fail this is one reason why i didn’t implemented it yet.
• I need another project (temporarily named libgnocr) in order to provide a modular OCR API and UI (primarily on top of OCRopus). Contribution are welcome.
• Preview is not stable nor optimized.
• Page Orientation is not yet handle (Adding button is not enough for adding a feature ).
• Memory leaks.
• Printing suck (yet).
• Documentation is incomplete (but we have screenshots).
• I didn’t attend at GUADEC 2007

The goods

• Far far far better SANE support.
• Far far far better scanner handling (no more hardcoded options, etc.).
• Multi threaded (no news about thread safe, comments welcome)
• Gegl based for effective huge image handling
• AbiScan : the power of Gnome Scan and OCRopus in Abiword
• Flegita Gimp : You can use Gegl in Gimp yet !
• Preliminary printing support
• Preview acquisition monitoring
• Modular preview area
• Module loading system, allow to install/uninstall backend (e.g. choosing twain/SANE; removing file, etc.)

I’m not satisfied with my amount of work during august. Well, i plan to work fulltime on Gnome Scan next week. Also, is should code a bit this week. Gnome Scan is about 12000 lines of code (excluding headers).

The best thing was contact with other people. First with Vincent Untz, my mentor, which was very distant, except when i need him . Then come all developers from external project like Gegl, OCRopus, AbiWord. The same for #gnome-hackers and various GIMPNet chan members. All that people must receive a hertlich thank from me. The same goes to user for their very important feeback (Merci Jean-François Fortin !) also you, dear reader and commenter.

Merci et à bientôt !

Étienne.

–
E Ultreïa !