Ne'er the TWAIN shall meet

By Tim on June 22, 2009 in News

: Image via Wikipedia

Like Wellington facing his old foe at Waterloo, this weekend I did laborious battle with the TWAIN specification and the scanner manufacturers determined to pervert it.

TWAIN is a standard that allows software programs to talk to image acquisition devices (scanners to you and me) in a common way. Although capitalized, TWAIN isn’t actually an acronym, and comes from Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” – “…and never the twain shall meet…”, and reflected the difficulties at the time of connecting scanners and computers. Although a later attempt to create an expansion of “TWAIN” failed, “Technology Without An Interesting Name” is still well remembered.

One of the challenges of developing software that makes use of scanners is that scanner manufacturers, for whatever reason, seem to be very bad at actually following the standard. In my office for example, I have a Brother MFC-7820N. It’s not bad, it has served me well over the last few years, but – the driver, as released by Brother, tells lies. I ask it what image formats it supports, and it lies. So I find myself continually relying on TWAIN less and less, and doing more and more in the application.

Today’s update (version 1.2009.6.4) is essentially a big step forward in scanner compatibility. Any problems you encounter, be sure to let me know. As usual, no action is required on your part, Home Document Manager will update itself whenever an Internet connection is present.

As an aside – if you’re on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you – http://twitter.com/documentmanager