I know I’m still convalescing so I should be resting, not thinking about development problems, but this is something that ended up in my mind because I have one thing to absolutely do (scan the release documents from the hospital to send to my GP), and for which I miss an easy interface I could instruct my mother, or my sister, to use.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are a few SANE frontends, starting from xsane itself, but the problem is that I don’t usually stop at scanimage when I do it from the console. What I usually do is to launch a batch scan to TIFF format, then use tiffcp to join the different TIFF files in a single file with multiple pages, and then use tiff2pdf to convert it to a PDF file, which is opened by any computer I might need to send the data to (and it also is quite smaller than the original TIFF file). Lately, I’ve started trying to add to the chain also unpaper, a tool that removes some of the defects usually found in scanning pages from books (like black borders and similar), which works on PNM (thus requiring a change in the scanning command, and a further conversion later on).
But I don’t want to start fleshing down how to actually write such a tool, or I might actually start writing it right now, which is not what I’m supposed to do while I’m convalescing.
What I want to think about is that here comes one huge debate between writing frontends for command-line tools, which just interfaces with them as process calling, or writing a full-fledged program that interfaces with the low-level libraries to provide similar functionalities.
I already happen to discuss that quite often since xine and mplayer embody the two spirits: xine has its library, frontends interface with that, and a single process is used; mplayer instead has a command interface, and frontends execute a new process for playing videos.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages, one easy to spot disadvantage to xine’s approach is that a crash or freeze in xine results in a crash or freeze of the frontend, which is something Amarok users have been unfortunately familiar with.
In the case of the scanning toolchain, though, I guess it’d be probably easier to use a frontend for the tools, as re-implementing all the different functionalities would be a non-trivial work.
The disadvantages of doing it this way, though, is that you’ll have to make sure that the tools don’t change their parameters between versions, otherwise it’d be a problem to ensure the correct functionality of the tool. Also, the tools need to provide enough options to control with granularity the execution of their task, which is something unpaper actually does, but in turn makes them almost unusable for final users.
I know I’m not going much anywhere with this post, I’m afraid, but I just wanted to reflect on the fact that to have a command line tool designed to be used by frontends, you almost certainly make its syntax so complex that users would fail to grasp the basic concepts, and in turn, you’d need a command line interface to the tool too… which is why there are so many scripts interfacing to ffmpeg for converting videos, I guess.
On the other hand, one can easily write such a frontend using scripting languages, even if it’s graphical, such as with ruby-gtk2 (think RubyRipper).