[cups.general] Scanners?

[Jerome Alet]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 04:15:09PM -0500, jkrahn at nc.rr.com wrote:
> I'm wondering if the CUPS network protocol could be expanded to 
> cover scanners, sort of reverse-printing? There does not yet seem to 
> be a good way to advertise network-available scanners, and making 
> part of CUPS seems to make a lot of sense to me. But, I don't know a 
> lot about CUPS, so I don't know how well a scanner would fit in. 

Just write a CUPS backend which instead of accepting PostScript or any
other Page Description Language, accepts some textual commands to
setup the area to be scanned, color or mono, and so on, maybe something
like :

--- CUT ---
device: (scanner's name in SANE's naming scheme)
mode: color
gamma: 1.0
position: 0,0
dimensions: 595.27,841.88       (A4)
format: jpeg
quality: 50
resolution: 300x300
routeto: XXXXXXX
....
--- CUT ---

the XXXXXXX in the routeto above could be of the form :

        print:somequeuename       ====> gives a simple copy machine
        mail:me at example.com       ====> send back the scanned file 
        application:somecommand   ====> pipes the scanned document into the
                                        command

        ...
        
then have your backend call SANE the proper way, and route the result
according to what is in routeto ...

to scan something, just print this plain text file to your "scanner"
print queue, and you're done

no need to change anything to CUPS or the protocol

of course the difficult part is on the client side : how do you
create such "scanjob" files ? a text editor is sufficient but
I mean when in other apps it may not be as trivial

is this completely stupid ?

hth

Jerome Alet