Interested in scanning?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 11:23 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> Yesterday, I was browsing Ubuntu's "Blueprints" for their next release,
> and saw this:
> https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-karmic-gnomescan
> 
> gnome-scan is already packaged by Deji, but I gather that more
> integration work could be done to make setting up and using scanners
> easier in GNOME and Fedora in general.
> 
> Any takers?
> 
> I think a good start would be making a list of problems seen in setting
> up scanners (additional packages required, tweaks), and make sure that
> gnome-scan and the necessary plugins are installed in a default
> installation.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> /Bastien, who doesn't own a scanner

I have a scanner, but it's a rather well-behaved one (an HP ScanJet
2100C). As long as SANE is installed you don't really need to do
anything to set it up - you can just run GIMP or xsane directly and get
to scanning.

Looking at gnome-scan, I see the author is asking for help:

http://blogs.gnome.org/gnome-scan/

testing it out, it seems a bit odd - it certainly has a nicer interface
than xsane's horribleness, but it seems a bit weird in places. It
defaulted to a rather odd scanned image size for me, and the preview tab
would only show that area of the page. I then switched to the 'Letter'
size on the main tab, previewed again, and the preview seemed to come
out right - but I couldn't then click and drag to resize the area to be
scanned. I had to go back to the main tab, switch back to 'Manual', then
go back to the preview tab before I could click and drag to resize - and
if I then tried to refresh the preview, it didn't preview correctly
again, it only previewed a tiny corner of the area and I couldn't click
and drag the selection to make it any bigger.

So I think the gnome-scan interface is nice but if my results are
reproduced by others, we can't really replace xsane with it until it's a
bit less buggy. It would be nice if any coders with scanning interest
could contribute to the code I guess (I'm unfortunately not a coder).

On the packaging side of things, I would also be happy to help but it
looks like we're not short of volunteers. What would be useful, I guess,
is input from anyone who has a scanner that's a pain to set up,
explaining what they have to do, so we could look into how we could ease
that task.

I may do a quick build of gnome-scan 0.7.1 to see if it addresses my
problems, though that's an unstable release we may not want to package
officially.

The thought also occurs that this is an area that would be helped by one
of my little hobby horses, the pony that I'd like to have which I call
HardwareKit, which is just my name for a little widget/layer/whatever
between udev/HAL/DeviceKit and PackageKit: it would allow the system to
prompt you to install a given set of packages when it notes a certain
piece or type of hardware being plugged in. So, in this case, if
HAL/DeviceKit notices a scanner being plugged in, it could call out to
PackageKit to install our scanning package group. That's something I've
been wishing we had for a while now.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net