> I am really confused :) > I was under the impression that the SANE project was proposing a better > alternative to the TWAIN interface. Better, meaning that the backend is > written once and is cross platform. That's what I understood from the intro > page on the web-site (I pasted part of the intro here for your convenience).
SANE makes it possible to have a frontend work with many different scanners, thus saving a lot of time and effort for developers. TWAIN it a simple interface between applications and a scanner frontend. It's not required for running the scanner, it doesn't save the developers any time or effort, but is demanded by almost everyone who buys a scanner for use under Windows or MacOS. In the long run, we'll have to make something like TWAIN too, but for the time being, frontends (xscanimage and xsane) have code for directly interfacing with the GIMP (and maybe others I'm not aware of). There's no standard interface right now, that's why you can't scan using SANE directly from within most other graphical applications. Andras
