I’m looking to make a KCM module for scanners since the current way of handling scanners mostly via the command line is a little haphazard. Also with colord going the way of the dodo, it would be a decent place to manage scanner color profiles in the future.
Essentially it would sort of be a manager for saned. As it stands, there’s a lot of manual configuration especially if you want to use scanners over a network and not the most friendly of setups.
I know this is a bit niche, as scanners aren’t much of a thing anymore outside of all-in-one printers. I do have one of those, but also a dedicated flatbed scanner and a film negative scanner and managing them across a couple computers has been a nuisance.
I’m just wondering if there’s any pitfalls I should look out for, or if it’s been done before and I would be duplicating work, etc. I did some basic searching and didn’t come across anything similar that’s been worked on for KDE outside of the deprecated Color Management module, but I could (quite likely) be missing something.
3 Likes
Hi - I’m no programmer, but just a couple of basic thoughts:
-
It might be helpful to scope out which situations would benefit from configuration through such a tool, and which ones don’t need it. For example, I was a bit confused when I was using openSUSE Tumbleweed about whether I needed to set up my basic all-in-one home printer in the YaST scanner tool - it seemed like I actually didn’t, in the end
-
Speaking of that - maybe that tool could be the source of some helpful prior art? GitHub - yast/yast-scanner: YaST module scanner
Ah, thanks! That’s the sort of thing I was looking for. I don’t use Tumbleweed and was not aware of that. My searching was likely too narrow. I’ll check it out.
I agree the idea could use a bit of refinement. A big part of it is getting a similar type of workflow in place that the old X11 Color Management module offered (macOS offers similar features with ColorSync). As I said, it’s a bit of a niche use case but very useful from an art perspective.
Also setting up a scanner for network use is currently a process that (possibly) could be made a lot easier. It’s not hard from the command line and config files, but it can be a bit obtuse if you aren’t sure what to look for.
I do see how there can be confusion with all-in-one models. I’ll look how Tumbleweed handles it and see there’s anything that can be improved.
Cool - for what it’s worth, as a non-artist, my two experiences with scanners under Linux have been:
-
HP all-in-one: thought I needed to do something to set it up, turns out just using Skanpage and letting the built-in IPP/SANE/etc. find everything worked just fine 
-
Epson fancy ADF-only, “real” scanner for accountants: thought I wouldn’t need to do anything to set it up, turns out the built-in Linux tools can’t fully use the device and I had to install Epson’s own drivers and scanning software to send all the right signals and have it perform the processing that it’s capable of (auto-skipping blank pages, auto-rotating, etc.)
And I don’t know if this is the right kind of art for what you’re talking about, but maybe the folks in the https://krita-artists.org/ community might have ideas too?
You should contact Till Kamppeter at openprinting.
openprinting also deals with scanners in connection with SANE :
About us –> Major roles –> Is working with SANE to make driverless scanning a reality.
2 Likes