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DPScanThe story of DPScan is that of TWAIN, DPScan was the application to use TWAIN which would be bundled with it. One requirement was that DPScan could handle images bigger than memory. In 1993 memory on Acorn computers was limited and scans could easily be bigger than memory. Virtual memory and Acorns had a chequered history, when it did eventually arrive in the shape of Virtualise from Clares it seemed most applications used Acorns sliding block memory manager (flex) which was optimally bad for VM. Anyway DPScan used its own VM system, tuned for bitmap images. I copied the workspace page interface from Ovation Pro DTP, which I'd done some work on by then. Using a page for scanning is not a bad idea, but it makes things different to a traditional pixel based bitmap program. Originally the idea was you scanned in a preview image to DPScan and then marked off the area of the final scan. Eventually TWAIN 2 went the way of scanner drivers on Windows, the driver displays the preview scan itself. I threw in many different image processing options and file types. I don't think DPScan was a great piece of software design, but it was useful. Typically if you bought a scanner you'd get DPScan and a TWAIN scanner driver bundled, although both were available separately as well as a combined package. DPScan was supplied with Snapper, Trace and D2Font. There is a Windows version of DPScan which was bundled with Ovation Pro for Windows. It was a useful test of my programming efforts on Windows and whilst there are many comparable pieces of software on Windows, few of them understand RISC OS Sprite files. DPScan was not the original name. Back in 1993, I made up a name, a bit similar to competing software on RISC OS and thought no more of it. There was no Google so I did not check if anything with that name existed. In 2002 I got a legal letter accusing me of "passing off", infringing someone else's trademark and so on. It came as a surprise to find that someone had been using the same name for remotely similar Windows software for longer than I'd used it on RISC OS. Eventually the legal situation was resolved, fortunately because my RISC OS sales did not affect someone else's Windows sales there were no damages. I was in the wrong and stopped using the original name the day I learnt of the other parties prior use of it. A lot of time and energy was wasted on the problem, for a program which by then was of no value. All of which explains the current name, it is something which no one else has used, the other names I could think of turned out to have been used for bitmap software. (Really, I wrote down a long list and checked them in Google, there's a lot of bitmap software around; I was not the only one to infringe the trademark mentioned). Chris Johnson took over working on the program, and you should seek out the latest version from his website: http://www.chris-johnson.org.uk/software/dpscan.html Downloads |
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