The Skanlite HandbookCopyright © 2008, 2013 Kåre Särs
Copyright © 2008 Anne-Marie Mahfouf
Skanlite is an image scanning application that does nothing more than scan and save images.
Skanlite is based on libksane, a KDE interface for SANE library to control image scanners.
Table of Contents
IntroductionSkanlite is a simple image scanning application that does nothing more than scan and save images. Skanlite can open a save dialog for every image scanned or save the images immediately in a specified folder with auto-generated names and format. The user can also choose to show the scanned image before saving.
Skanlite can save images in all the formats supported by Qt™. For example the following formats:
png (8 and 16 bits per color)
jpeg, jpg, jpeg 2000
bmp
Note
You can check the status of your scanner support from the SANE project website by entering the information on this search page: http://www.sane-project.org/cgi-bin/driver.pl.
Using SkanliteA default scanner can be specified on the command line of Skanlite using skanlite -d [device name] in a terminal. If the selected scanner cannot be opened or if no default scanner is provided, a scanner selection dialog is opened.
The user can choose the scanner to be used and press to open the scanner. Pressing will cause Skanlite to exit.
In case no devices were found, maybe because the scanner is not plugged in or switched off, correct that. Then the can be used to reload the list of scanners.
Note
Not all drivers/backends support this feature. In that case quit Skanlite, connect your scanner and restart the application.
Skanlite Main Window
In the main window, the user has two sets of scan options: Basic Options and Scanner Specific Options. The Basic Options tab contains the most common parameters that the SANE scanner backends provide, while the Scanner Specific Options tab contains all the options of the backend. The options listed here depend on SANE support for your driver: libksane (which Skanlite uses) should be able to display most of the types of parameters that SANE provides (analog gamma tables are not supported at this time).
The scanner specific options contains more detailed options of the backends. Skanlite (libksane) does not have any special handling for these options.
If you are satisfied with your settings, you can use the little arrow on the top of the options splitter. When clicked it collapses or expands the options. The collapser can overlap the preview area, but fades away when the mouse cursor moves out of the collapser.
To scan an image, the user can start with a preview scan and then select the part of the scan area to do the final scan on. The preview scan is started by pressing the preview button.
When the preview is scanned the area for the final image can be selected.
To better select the image the user can zoom in, out, to the current selection or zoom to fit the whole preview to the window.
When the image is selected the final image can be acquired by pressing the final scan button.
You will see the progress of the scan.
If Preview before saving is selected in the settings, the scanned image is displayed in a preview window as you can see below on the screenshot. If is pressed, the image is saved and if is pressed the preview is discarded and you return to the main window.
Scanning Multiple SelectionsSometimes you need only certain parts of an image. Instead of scanning the whole picture and then using a graphics application (e.g. KolourPaint) to save the different image parts into separate files, use Skanlite's multiple selection feature.
Scan a preview and then use the mouse button to select the first part of the image in the preview. Hover the selected area with mouse cursor and click on the green + icon to select the area. Selected areas are indicated by a red border. Now select the next parts of the image in the same way.
To remove a single selection hover the area with the mouse cursor and click on the red - icon. With Clear Selections from the context menu launched with the mouse button all selections in a preview can be removed.
If you placed two separate images or photos on you scanner and started a preview Skanlite automatically preselect the different areas. This behaviour can be switched off in the settings dialog.
If you are satisfied with your choice starting the final batch scan of all selections. The images are saved using the batch renaming feature described in the settings dialog.
Skanlite settingsBy clicking the button, the settings dialog is brought up before the main window. You can choose the most important settings here.
- Preview before saving:
The user can chose to preview the image before saving. In this case the Preview before saving option can be left checked. If the user does not want to preview the image this option should then be unchecked.
- Save Mode:
This setting allows you to choose how Skanlite will save the images. If you choose Open the save dialog for every image the save dialog will be opened for every scanned image. If you prefer Skanlite to auto-save (by auto-generating a name and saving the image in a predefined folder) you can choose Open the save dialog for the first image only. This option will open the following "Save Location" dialog for the first scanned image.
- Save Location:
This setting defines the default save location and file naming. The default save location is your home folder and you can change this location by clicking on the button.
- Name Format:
This parameter defines the image prefix for the auto-saved images and is also the suggested name for the image in the save dialog. The auto-saved image will have a numeric suffix (the ### will be replaced by numbers) that is increased every time an image is saved.
You can also choose the save format of the file, default is png.
- Specify save quality:
The user can chose to specify the image quality to be used for saving the images. The image quality setting affects the compression level used for saving. If Specify save quality is not checked, the quality is the default value chosen by Qt™.
- Set preview resolution (DPI)
Skanlite is using heuristics to try to get a sane resolution, but if that fails and the resolution is too high or low, then the preview resolution can be manually set with this option.
- Disable automatic selections
By default automatic selections are enabled; and after a preview, libksane does try to automatically select the images in the preview and should batch scan the selected areas. e.g. if you place two photos on the scanner and do a preview, Skanlite will automatically add selections of the photos.
If on the other hand you are usually scanning documents it might be that the automatic selection will select a lot of different parts in the documents and you have to manually remove the selections. To avoid that tick the checkbox and disable automatic selection.
- Revert scanner options to default values
The last used settings are reloaded on startup. If you have screwed up the options (for example if you have changed the color correction settings, available in some backends, without knowing what they mean), the image can start to look very odd. For that scenario this option provides a way to revert the setting to the default values, which are a combination of backend and libksane defaults.
Help, About, Settings and Close
Credits and LicenseSkanlite
Program copyright 2007 Kåre Särs (kare dot sars at iki dot fi)
Contributors:
Author: Kåre Särs
(kare dot sars at iki dot fi)
This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Skanlite is licensed under the GPL and the libksane library, used by Skanlite, is licensed under the LGPL. Note: libsane is licensed under GPL with an exception.