xsane in Mga 7/cauldron produces a useless preview window. If I open it from the main xsane window, a blank window is drawn. The buttons are there since if I blindly click on the bottom of the page, I get the scanner to send a preview, which displays, but then I cannot seee what I select.(the dashed line does not get drawn around the selected area). It is selected since if I then click on scan, the area I blindly chose is scanned As I move mymouse over the window, I get little triangles drawn along the border of what wold have been the display subwindow. I got this behaviour occasionally before in Mga 6 and 5 and but could not figure out why, and usually reopeing the preview window would make things work. Under cauldron, it never works properly. Is it a setting? (which?) Is it a permission? (which) xsane always does this, and it makes xsane unuseable. Note: The above happens if I open xsane on the machine that the scanner is attached to. If I ssh into that machine from antoher, and open xsane, the preview window displays fine. So I am totally confused as to what could be happening. Scanner epson Perfection 1660-photo usb attached. lsusb: Bus 001 Device 012: ID 04b8:011e Seiko Epson Corp. GT-8300UF [Perfection 1660 PHOTO]
You're talking about (from the screen that comes after selecting your scanner) the "Show preview" option from the "Window" menu, right? That gives a blank screen, here, too, and indeed: blindly selecting an area gives a scan of what seems to be the blindly selected area. Xsane isn't unuseable now, though... it is still possible to do a full scan, save the image and then use e.g the GIMP to cut off the undesired area. Assingning to our registered Xsane maintainer.
CC: (none) => marja11Assignee: bugsquad => lists.jjorge
Xsane is working OK for me. I have the Preview window always open when Xsane is launched. When I select "Acquire preview" on that window xsane gives a normal preview.
CC: (none) => jim
Perhaps this is hardware related? My device is HP multi-function Envy 4502
This sounds like a bug in the xsane repaint logic. In most window systems, the window gets drawn initially, the user interacts with it in some ways that mark portions of the display area "invalid", and when the application is done with whatever background processing the user requested, the window system runs through all of the visible window components, creates a composite list of rectangular areas in the window that have to be redrawn, and redraws only those. This is considered more efficient than redrawing the entire display from scratch. In many cases, the application has to interact with the window system to tell it that areas have become invalid because of logic specific to the app. Depending on the app, the language, and the window system, this can be an arcane art. In your case, it sounds like the scanner preview process is not marking the preview display area invalid at the time of the scan. But the mouse activity *is* telling the window system that parts of the display that it has traced over have become invalid, and therefore they are redrawn.
CC: (none) => ftg
I did a search on google after I wrote the above, and this has beena complaint since at least 2012, and I have seen it before but just intermittently. Now it is always broken. But a "fix" was found as well. Edit the file .sane/xsane/<scannername> (for example on mine it is Epson\:GT-8300.drc ) edit the lines "xsane-show-preview" 0 and change them to "xsane-show-preview" 1 (This is before you have opened xsane) Now when you open xsane, the preview window will open as well and it is working I have not done a detailed investigation as to whether if I close the preview window and then reopen it, it still works. Re Griffin's comments, it does seem to be something like that. If I move the mouse over the blank window, I get a row of small triangle painted on the edges of the interior invisible preview pane, but none of the buttons appear, nor does the dotted "selection" marker, making the preview pretty useless. Yes, I could scan everything and hope that xsane has selecteden the appropriate area or the full page. I know however from using the old xsane (previous versions of Mageia) that it does not always do so. Oh higher resolutions, it can also take a long time to scan all the blank areas. So I would not say that it is useless but certainly a major feature of the software is broken. Note that even with the xsane-show-preview as 0, the preview window would flash onto the screen very very briefly when I open xsane. But reopening (from the Windows menu item on the main xsane window) the preview window would have the broken behaviour. So it seems that the preview window is opened by default, and somehow the way of removing it leaves that window in the state described by Griffin. Because the generation of the .sane/xsane/<scannername> occurs after installation of xsane, it would not seem possible to workaround by changing an installation file. It probably really is time that this bug in xsane were squashed once and for all:-)
A few data points. a) Instead of editing .sane/xsane/<scannername>, open xsane, open the preview windows which is blank. close xsane from the main xsane window manu (File->Quit) without closing that blank preview window, then reopen xsane. Now the fully painted preview window will open. b) If a proper preview window was open, and is then closed, either by the window closed button on the tool bar, or by unchecking the preview window in the main xsane window menu labeled Window, and then reopened the preview with the Window button, it opens properly. c)If you use xsane, close the preview window, and then Quit xsane, the next time the preview window will not open and if you open it from the menu, it will be broken (blank) Note that this behaviour is independent for each user of the system, which is especially annoying since one has to train each user separately.
(In reply to w unruh from comment #5) > I did a search on google after I wrote the above, and this has beena > complaint since at least 2012, and I have seen it before but just > intermittently. Now it is always broken. Did you find an upstream bug report about the issue? We need a link to it (it needs to be filed there, if it doesn't already exist). Thanks for sharing the workaround :-)
Keywords: (none) => UPSTREAM
No I did not find other bug reports but I also was not looking.These were mainly questions on various help forums. They pointed me to the .sane/xsane files where I found the the various preview options. I wrote to Oliver Rausch (at Oliver.Rauch@rauch-domain.de directly but have received no answer). The xsane.org web page is not functioning any more. I am not sure where to file an upstream bug.
I have looked a bit Ubuntu 2009 Forum https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1125371 Mandriva 2009 -- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.os.linux.mandriva/j00CZgYIpZU (report by me) Ubuntu 2010 ---Bug #540306 Debian 2013--- Bug #712281 Debian 2017--- Bug #867667 And many more. Ie, this is a VERY old bug. But in Cauldron, it is especially bad since now it always opened with a blank window after installation. It seems that the MCC setup of a scanner sets xsane-show-preview to 0 now in the scanner .drc file in ~/.sane/xsane, and that triggers this behaviour. One way around this would be to have MCC set that flag to 1, and then at least the preview window would work on initial use. However, if the user ever shut the preview window before shutting down xsane, that user would in in the same creek without his paddle again. As explained in comment 4, it seems that opening the window on startup with preview off leaves the window manager totally confused. One possible hint is that in that case, the preview window opens-- seemingly with its buttons and display intact-- very very briefly (<1/10 sec?) and then it disappears. Ie, it would seem that the shutdown of the window on startup leaves that window's state in gtk in some bizarre state. However, how to use that hint to fix xsane is way beyond my competence.
Summary: xsane in cauldron produces a useless pereview window => xsane in cauldron produces a useless preview window
Of course now I cannot get it to duplicate that brief show of the full preview window before destroying it if xsane-show-preview is 0, so my hint may be useless.
This bug needs upstream work, but the site xsane.org was closed. There is no more an official upstream tarball. So it needs love from someone, who can fork it, or it will slowly die.
Since xsane seems to be about the only scanner gui software (?) it would be a bit of a disaster if it disappeared
(In reply to w unruh from comment #12) > Since xsane seems to be about the only scanner gui software (?) it would be > a bit of a disaster if it disappeared Not the only http://sane-project.org/sane-frontends.html I like more the UI of Image Scan , sadly is just for Epson
The xsane code is now on gitlab https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/sane-announce/2019/000037.html
Assignee: lists.jjorge => pkg-bugs
To be revisited whenever we have updated sane. Bug 30703 - Update the complete sane stack
CC: (none) => fri