Twain - Definition and Overview

This article is about the software API. See also Mark Twain.

TWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name) is a standard for getting input from image scanners: an image capture API for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The standard was first released in 1992, and is currently ratified at version 1.9 as of January 2000. TWAIN is typically used as an interface between image processing software and a scanner or digital camera.

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard.

The disadvantage of TWAIN is that it does not separate the user-interface from the driver of a device. This makes it difficult to provide transparent network access. Whenever an application loads a TWAIN driver it is completely unattachable from the supplied manufacturers GUI. A solution to this is an open-source piece of software called SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy).

The other major standard for document scanner hardware is ISIS.

References

External link

• twain.org (http://www.twain.org/)