Gnome Scan Weekly Report 2007/08/10

[Étienne Bersac <bersace03 laposte net>]

Hi everybody,

Tomorrow, i'll go out for a journey by family. I may not have internet
access monday, and even not that new thing to tell you. This is why i
produce the weekly report today for all the week.

In 4 days of development, Gnome Scan received lot of high value
improvements. The first one is AbiScan. AbiScan is an abiword plugin on
top of Gnome Scan and OCRopus that provide OCR to abiword. That's really
experimental, but anyway, that's a great news for OCR in Gnome. Ars
Technica even provide a good article about that :
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/06/abiword-gets-experimental-ocr-scanning-support Thanks Ryan Paul for its very complete article.

As Ryan Paul explain very well, that's really experimental. Taking users
comment in account, i'm thinking of a C/GObject API for OCR in Gnome
allowing to use different engine via either modules or ./configure
option. This API will include UI allowing to preview/correct/monitor OCR
process (just like GtkPrint for printing and Gnome Scan for scanning).
The OCR backend of choice is of course OCRopus. This change from my
initial plan to work for a libocropus-gnome, inside OCRopus project.
I'll need a new Gnome SVN repos for that. :)

I resurrected flegita-gimp on top of the new Gnome Scan. This is the
first use of Gegl in Gimp, for which Gegl has been designed ;). I'm
currently working on adding printing (and thus PDF support) to flegita.
This require some hacking with GtkPrint API. I especially wonder how to
print all pages in one document without storing all pages in memory. I
may store each GeglBuffer, but i need to ensure that GeglBuffer stores
tiles on disk (by e.g. disabling cache).

Motivation is back for good. I'll try to work each morning while i'm by
family. This will help me take the time to design the future of Gnome
Scan.

Regards,
�ienne.
-- 
E Ultre�!