One year later, i have to admit that GNOME Scan wasn’s as dead as i though. Thanks to Philipp SADLEDER, the team triaged bugs, kept master uptodate with GNOME hosting and dependencies, etc. I decided to release a quite stable snapshot of master, even if no fundamental features were added, to allow further developments.

This release was built with vala 0.7.6. It support SANE 1.0.20 which require some more controls from the frontend. Some bugs were fixed and minor features were added. I also added unit testing framework. Here are some details :

• Added option value preselection. Preselect resolution, papersize and format ;
• Compute scanner icon (e.g. multifunction printer) ;
• Support pixel device (e.g. webcam) ;
• Handle hardware extent. Filter papersize not fitting hardware extent ;
• Fixed bugs:
  • inverted black&white on 1bit scan.
  • perpetual waiting cursor and call to null GdkWindow in GnomeScanDialog.

You will find sources at usual place :

• http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-scan/0.7/

No binary packages are planned. Help is still welcome. Next step is to write tests and continue development of features ! There are some news to go, stay tuned

Regards,

Étienne

After one month of heavy development, i release GNOME Scan 0.7.1. This release is an alpha “preview” of the 0.8 series. It has several regression, however it already show improvments in behaviour, features and support.

You can download it at http://download.gnome.org/source/gnome-scan/0.7/

See detailed annoucement at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2009-January/msg00044.html including known regressions.

This version is not parralel installable with 0.6. However, you should be able to run it from source : run ./configure && make && src/flegita .

last weeks, i didn’t work as heavily as in december. Some bugs gets fixed in 0.6. 0.8 won’t land along 2.26 because i won’t be able to follow feature freeze and such. This is another good reason to maintain 0.6 branch. Philipp Sadleder is THE maintainer of the 0.6 branch. I fix bug he ask me to fix. He does a pretty good work and help me a lot triaging bug, fixing bug, etc. 0.6 is a quite good version with enhanced support and performance. Even if 0.8 does better in all of these fields, 0.6 is a major release that should have its glory

0.8 will be for 2.28. There is good chance to get it with 2.28. There is preview area, processing, flegita-gimp, flegita-print, prerequisite, saving to GConf and other things to implement before 0.8 gets ready. That’s fairly big piece of the project but a huge part has been done. 0.7 has only 1000 C lines less than 0.6.1.

All in all, releasing 0.8 six month later allows other project like vala to evolve and mature. This should make 0.8 a very good base. 0.7.2 will include preview area and prerequisite. I plan to follow 2.27 schedule for beta, string freeze, etc.

Regards,

Étienne.

Due to demand, I decided to branch 0.6 and maintain it a bit. Gnome Scan 0.4 is still tryied by some users due to ubuntu but it has blocker bug. So was 0.6 along older version of Gegl. So i updated 0.6 to Gegl 0.0.21 SVN, fixed a tiny bug about cursor and add support for Gimp 2.6 menu layout to Gimp plugin.

Download it at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-scan/0.6/ .

Today, i got Gnome Scan to actually scan the file. Building the Gegl pipeline is done.next step is to port GSane to new API. There is still a lot of work until feature partity : preview, processing, Gimp plugin, etc. Then documentation etc. Nevertheless, i committed the work to SVN in order to allow tester an contributors to participate. I’ll publish a 0.7.1 version before Christmass at all cost, including no preview or no gimp plugin.

Regards,

Étienne.

Finally, i got GNOME Scan 0.6 ready and sync with GNOME 2.22. This release is a big milestone. Let me expose you all the changes since 0.4.

• Completely redesigned and rewritten
• Modularize all the acquisition pipeline from the scanner to the sink.
• Dynamic pipeline plugins parameter list exposed to the UI
• Based on GEGL for huge sized image handling and much much more
• multi thread anywhere : probing, acquisition and more
• acquisition from images
• automatic per application scan settings saving in GConf
• optionnal automatic color enhancement
• available in 15 languages
• Streamlined GUI for mass acquisition
• extended SANE driver support and workarounds
• Regression: no PDF nor JPEG saving

Please make a big welcome to this milestone, ask your distro to publish it along GNOME 2.22 and report ideas, bugs and more for the future.

• http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-scan/0.6
  
• Available in my PPA for gutsy and hardy.

As 0.6 says, the road is long before 1.0 which will be hopefully synced with GNOME version number. Amongs other things here are the plans for the future:

• Consolidate code and API. This is important before producing bindings, tutorial, etc. for wider adoption from developers.
  • Split dialog code for better reusability
  • Review preview UI management
  • improve option handling, especially for high level option like PaperSize, etc.
  • Improve device handling: status/error reporting, opening in seperate thread, etc.
• Merge scan dialog and acquisition dialog, allow to configure next scan without relaunching dialog
• Use hal scanner API and hotplug smoothness as well as signal monitoring
• Fully migrate to GeglOperation, this avoid us to split the progress bar in 3 stage.
• Support sheet-fed scanners, webcam, etc.
• PDF, jpeg, printing and more for flegita.

I started some weeks ago the work on hal-scanner. It’s going well, i’ll submit it to HAL and take it in account as soon as possible in gnome-scan. Packages will always be in my PPA.

Don’t hesitate to report well commented bug for GNOME Scan . You know i really want to finally fix this big whole in GNOME and desktops in general about scanning. Your use case, your ideas, your hardware specific behaviour/feature interest me a lot. Reporting all that in bugzilla allow me to have a high view of all the neds and design properly for most uses. Thanks

Regards,

Étienne.

I’m very happy with feedback from 0.5.93 release. I merged 3 patches from Ross Burton and got translation updates. I decide to provide a new RC release due to the big amout of bug fixes this release has :

• Migrate to new GTK+ tooltip API. Depends on GTK+ 2.12
• Added blurb for PNG compression level option in flegita.
• Translate application name in about flegita dialog.
• Focus Forward button in GnomeScanAcquisitionDialog.
• Fixed hidden option exposed in UI (bug #519331).
• Don’t depends on libgnome and libgnomeui, thanks to Ross Burton (bug #519344). Fixed untranslated application name.
• Don’t version modules, thanks to Ross Burton (bug #519350).
• Cleaned up build system, thanks to Ross Burton.
• Fixed GSFile backend not updated for a while. Migrated to GEGL 0.0.16, etc.
• Use explicit gettext domain in library rather than using application defined one.

Updated translation from Jorge González (es), Étienne Bersac (fr) and Daniel Nylander (sv)

Sources are in GNOME FTP, Packages are available in my PPA. I may provide 0.5.95 monday march the 3rd and will release 0.6 monday march the 10th as promised. Please report bugs and translate

Étienne.

I’m very pleased to announce the availability of Gnome Scan 0.5.93. It’s a very good release, it’s not 0.6 only because i want to wait until hard code freeze in order to get more translation, and feedback. This annoucement include 0.5.92 version which was released monday.

• Clean preview handling allowing to use hardware capability
• Manual page orientation handling
• Use 75.dpi as hardcoded resolution, this is more common accross backend.
• Accurate preview area ROI selection using real rather than integer.
• Fixed preview acquisition progress bar not shown (regression).
• Fix lots of ref/unref leaks both GeglBuffer and widgets
• Automatic per app option saving in GConf
• Automatic color enhancement.
• Use a waiting cursor if probing in background.
• Dropped buggy printing in flegita.
• About dialog is back.
• Depends on GEGL 0.0.16 (this won’t change until 0.7.1).
• Reworked and completed documentation, needs some tutorial, but API is not stable enough for that.

Without color enhancement

With color enhancement enabled

As you can see, there is tons of bug fixes, 0.5.9X are really beta version, even if the API and internal code are meant to change in the future, i wanted to get a stable version enough for production. Please test it and translate it !

• Gnome Scan sources tarball
• Gnome Scan Ubuntu gutsy debs
• Report bug
• Translation statistics
  

SVN has new tooltip API and minor changes. I plan only to document that all, fill bugs for next version and plan the future. 0.6 will be in time for Gnome 2.22

Regards,
Étienne.

After holidays and slow work, if finaly release 0.5.4 including processing infrastruture and rotation. There is other enhancement and bug fixes detailed in the NEWS file. This release is in sync with GEGL r1840. GEGL might provide a 0.0.16 release for march, i wish Gnome Scan 0.6 will arrive sync in march.

Thanks to Gnome wonderful admins, i now have access to Gnome FTP. install-module is a pretty handy tool ! So now, the download site is http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-scan/. You’ll find tarballs in http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-scan/0.5/. Packages are already uploaded to my PPA.

Please report test it and report bugs. I know this release has some bugs and i wish to get it stable for march. I want to add PDF output and that should be ok for 0.6. The rest will be bug fixes. I prefer to reject features for 0.8 (more processing, etc.). I might update AbiScan for use with 0.6 and latest ocropus, but nothing sure.

Étienne

It’s time for a new release. So please welcome Gnome Scan 0.5.2 loosly codenamed « Ça ROCs » due to AbiScan dependency on this release . Amongst other changes, here are some highlights :

• Preview area drawning and selection
• Action framework in flegita (added [buggy] printing feature)
• Revamped icon handling. Use “scanner” icon from icon naming spec.
• Resurrected Gimp plugin.
• Several API enhancements.
• Some bugfixes.

I encourage you to test and report as much bug as possible. There is a lot of room for improvement and some area are still untouched (e.g. processing). In the near future, i plan to improve area handling and preview area (resize, move, etc). After that, i should take a stand and design proper processing model and implement it. I need to fix printing, but GtkPrint seems not that suitable if you dissociate dialog and printing. Needs further investigation. I hope to provide 0.5.3 for october.

Please hunt the bug !

Kind regards,
Étienne.

It’s time for a release after the reset of the project. Gnome Scan 0.5.1 has almost all features of 0.4 and tons of both user visible and internals improvements. Highlight of this release are plugin system, dynamic UI building, Gegl-base processing, multi-threaded programming, file acquisition and more. Regressions from 0.4 are : no rotation, no gimp plugin (please notify me if you find other). Read the NEWS and ChangeLog for more informations.

• You can download sources at http://download.gna.org/gnomescan/gnome-scan-0.5.1.tar.gz
• I provide Ubuntu Feisty Fawn .deb source and i386 .deb at deb http://bersace03.free.fr/ubuntu feisty universe .
• Update: History screenshots ( You can play finding differences between two following screenshots)

I produce this release in order to get feedbacks. Especially, i would like feedbacks on SANE support, UI design, responsiveness as well as API. If anyone feel like writing the Gimp plugin, that would be a great test for the new design.

Update: I fixed packaging, thanks to Karel Demeyer and Anonymous #1.

Cheers !
Étienne.

Today i release 0.4.1 version of gnome-scan. This is a bugfix release. It handle resolution enum and drop dual resolution handling. Thanks Jean-François Fortin for reporting the bug and Philipp Sadleder for the patch.

• http://download.gna.org/gnomescan/gnomescan-0.4.1.tar.gz

Gnome Scan 0.4 is far too hardcoded. It’s incredible to see how gnome-scan 0.5 change this. I really don’t want to maintain 0.4 branch, it’s a waste of time. I won’t maintain any paste branch with 0.X version number.

You can test gnome-scan 0.5 SVN by using ubuntu packages i provide at

deb http://bersace03.free.fr/ubuntu feisty universe

The repository contains gnome-scan SVN and all the dependencies. (babl and gegl SVN). Deb sources are available.

Currently, gnome-scan 0.5 implements device and sink configuration. Acquisition works one or multiple (sane backend does not support yet multiple acquisition). No preview area yet, not rotation nor any processing yet. Also, beware that flegita overwrite existing files. Anyway, with gnome-scan 0.5, you can taste all the new features and improvements. I let you discover them .

Regards,
Étienne