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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Volunteering to port Kooka to KDE4
From:       John Layt <johnlayt () googlemail ! com>
Date:       2009-10-16 20:10:18
Message-ID: 200910162110.19165.johnlayt () googlemail ! com
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On Friday 16 October 2009 20:35:55 Klaas Freitag wrote:
> Hi Eduard,

Klaas has pretty much taken the words from my mouth.  I looked into adopting 
Kooka around 4.0 and even started writing a new scanning library, but the 
libksane guy got the basics in first and I got diverted by printing.  I think 
I drew the short straw :-)

We only want one scanning utility library, so resurrecting libkscan is a no 
go, you would need to port Kooka to libksane as well.  So my first 
recommendation is to compare libkscan and libksane and see what libksane still 
needs adding to bring it up to par.  I seem to recall it focused only on the 
basic features, and I don't think the architecture was quite as flexible as I 
thought was needed to support all the advanced features later on, but it's 
been a while.  I'm not sure how actively maintained it is?

The Kooka shell can be mostly thrown away, especially the image library 
management stuff, we already have plenty of apps for that.  The really 
valuable stuff was mostly in libkscan anyway (the scan widget itself, the 
settings widget, etc), and the really gold stuff was the OCR side.  If you can 
make the OCR function an embeddable widget, kpart and Kipi plugin, then it can 
be used by any image management app such as Gwenview on the images it manages, 
and you can then write a new specialised scanning app from scratch around it.

With regard to OCR, I guess your main support target these days would be 
tesseract, Google's OCR engine (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/), but 
I think most of the old targets are still around.

And you may want to look at the now long dead Quiteinsane which had more 
complete support than Kooka in the settings area (I have a tarball if you 
can't find the source).  Xsane obviously should also be a good reference for 
settings and features, if not GUI design.

Good luck!

John.
 
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