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.
TWAIN is a standard for getting input 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 an acronym for "Technology (or Toolkit) 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 28th of 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. To be precise, it is not a fault of TWAIN specification but of such device drivers, because they are not fully compliant with TWAIN.
Origin of the name
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.)
See also
- Image and Scanner Interface Specification (ISIS)
- Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
- Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE)
References
This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.