TWAIN

:This article is about TWAIN in computing. See also Mark Twain for the American writer and Shania Twain for the Canadian country music artist. "Twain" is also a word meaning two.

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TWAIN 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. It is currently ratified at version 1.9 as of January 2000 and is maintained by the TWAIN Working Group. TWAIN is typically used as an interface between image processing software and a scanner or digital camera.

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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, and to date there is no "official" acronym. (The entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard.)

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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 manufacturer's GUI. A solution to this is an open-source piece of software called SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy).

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Computing: Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations....

Mark Twain: Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30 1835 – April 21 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous and popular American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer....

American: :This page disambiguates the many uses of American. For an article about those various uses, please see Use of the word American....

TWAIN related Images and Photos (experimental)

Mark Twain	Mark Twain	Mark Twain's America (DVD)	Mark Twain 2011 Wall Calendar
Adventures of Mark Twain, The (DVD)	Shania Twain Rolling Stone no. 915 February 2003	Adventures of Mark Twain, The (On Demand)	Shania Twain Rolling Stone no. 794 September 1998
Mark Twain Playing Pool with the Daughter of His Biographer Albert Bigelow Paine	Puck Magazine: Puckographs Mark Twain	Portrait of Mark Twain the Gallery of Modern Art Pitti Palace Florence	And Behold the Veil of the Temple was Rent in Twain from the Top to the Bottom