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 !