Re: xsane-0.31 available

Oliver Rauch (oliver.rauch@Wolfsburg.DE)
Tue, 03 Aug 1999 17:01:02 +0200

"Ewald R. de Wit" wrote:

> Oliver Rauch (oliver.rauch@Wolfsburg.DE) wrote:
>
> > the idea of the infrared-channel of the slide scanners is comparable
> > to the alpha channel. It is to detect dust and things like that to
> > identify the transparency of the slide.
>
> Well I hope the name RGBI will be used in a new SANE standard. There
> is a vague analogy between the IR and the alpha channel but this
> doesn't warrent to call them 'comparable', let alone to use their
> names interchangebly.
>
> > Of course we could add an IR and an UV channel and thousands of other
> > channels, but then somone should go and define image file formats that do
> > suppurt such data.
>
> What image file formats do or do not exist has actually got nothing to
> do with the topic at hand. SANE is only concerned with the data flow
> between scanner, backend, frontend and potentially something
> in between. It is of no concern to SANE how the data is stored on file.
> Besides, perhaps a future frontend will know how to process these
> thousends of data channels to export only 3 neatly corrected RGB channels
> (hyperscanning comes to mind, where the full spectrum for each pixel
> is measured).
>
> You don't seem to have addressed my concerns, namely that your name
> change is confusing to people and an obsticle to future additions of
> functionality.
>

Hi Ewald,

it does not make any sense to define thousands of frame formats if the frontends

are not able to handle them.
So the right way is to make available the formats the frontends are able to
save,
that is 1 bit, gray, RGB and RGBA. We could also add CMYK and such things,
also JPEG could be interisting, and I think one day we will add this.
A second thing is to define a frame like SANE_FRAME_RAW
where the frontend simply dumps the data into a file. But that is one file
format and
there is no need to define thousands of SANE_FRAME_WHATEVER
because the fronends will not be able to handle it.

Bye
Oliver

--
EMAIL: Oliver.Rauch@Wolfsburg.DE
WWW: http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch

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