TWAIN

For other uses, see Twain.

TWAIN is a standard for acquiring images from image scanners: an image capture API for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. The word TWAIN is not officially an acronym; however, it is widely known as a backcronym for "Technology (or Toolkit or Thing) Without An (or Any) Intelligent (or Important or Interesting) Name".

Overview

The standard was first released in 1992. It is currently ratified at version 2.0 as of 28 November 2005 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.

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 (Graphical user interface). To be precise, it is not a fault of the TWAIN specification but of such device drivers, because they are not fully compliant with TWAIN.

Origin and background of the name

The word TWAIN is taken from the refrain of Rudyard Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West":

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

The term was chosen to reflect the difficulty experienced, at that time, of attempting to connect scanners and personal computers. The backronym "Technology Without An Interesting Name" originated from early working group activity, though they do not accept it as an acronym.

Kevin Bier, chairman-emeritus of the TWAIN Working Group and the original author/editor of TWAIN 1.0 (with the aid of several others from seven companies), confirms authoritatively that TWAIN, while not officially an acronym, was conceived as referring to a "toolkit without an important name."

This non-acronym was inspired by Bier's contemporaneous reading of a collection of letters by Mark Twain. Bier reports that he finished reading one such letter at nearly midnight one evening, then checked voicemail one last time only to receive notice of yet another set of potential names for the as-yet-nameless technology. In aggravation, he made up the name on the spot and left it as a heated suggestion in a voicemail reply. The name search succeeded and, following consultation with the Mark Twain (S. L. Clemens) estate to assure the legality of the use, the name was officially launched on February 29, 1992 (which Bier saw as "a fitting date for release of our endeavor").

Bier observes that some believe the binding of the UI into the TWAIN "driver" (actually a piece of application code and not a driver at all) is a failing. He responds that it was an explicit design goal of the group to lay responsiblity for presenting the functionality of the device in the hands of the device manufacturer.

"It was our premise that no one else could know all the features of the device or how best to present that functionality to the user," Bier says. "Regardless of one's opinion about the relative goodness of that premise, it was an essential foundation of the success of the spec as measured both by adoption and adoptability."

See also

• Image and Scanner Interface Specification (ISIS)
• Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
• Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE)

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL, as well as a letter from Kevin Bier directly to Wikipedia concerning the background of the name.

External links

• TWAIN Working Group
• JTwain makes possible for Java to access TWAIN devices.