CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 465 Screen Shots (Web hosting ecommerce)
CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 465 Screen Shots and Scanners: the Acquire Menu Most of your work with GIMP will probably begin with existing images, such as photographs, or a blank canvas. But there s another way to obtain images: the File . Acquire menu. Acquire offers two seemingly unrelated functions: screen shots, and communication with devices such as scanners. But they both have something in common: GIMP needs to run a system program in order to import an image. The Acquire menu also offers Paste as New, which you ve probably already used in other contexts. It simply creates a new image out of whatever layer or selection has been most recently copied or cut. Scanning from GIMP If you don t have a scanner, only Screenshot will be available in the menu. If you have a scanner, you need two software pieces in order to scan directly to the GIMP: The driver for your scanner A scanning plug-in for the GIMP Scanner drivers use one of two common protocols: TWAIN or SANE. TWAIN is most commonly used on Windows systems, and is also popular on Mac. It s usually provided as part of the drivers shipped with a new scanner. The origin of the name is unclear: some say that it stands for Technology Without An Important Name, but people on the TWAIN committee say it comes from Kipling s phrase Never the twain shall meet, reflecting the previous difficulty of connecting scanners to computers. SANE is an open source protocol. It stands for Scanner Access Now Easy. It s commonly used on Linux and Mac systems, but it s available for Windows as an add-on. Its home page is http://www.sane-project.org/. Macs add one more menu entry, Image Capture…, which can grab images from a webcam, if you have one. Whichever protocol you use for your scanner, you will need an appropriate plug-in for the GIMP to find the scanner. For SANE, there s the xsane-gimp plug-in; for TWAIN, there s a Twain Acquire plug-in that should be part of the GIMP packages on Mac and Windows. Either of these plug-ins will create a new submenu inside the Acquire menu, called XSane or TWAIN Acquire. With your scanner turned on, check the contents of this menu. It may list the scanner there already, in which case the menu item will bring up a scanning dialog. Alternately, it may simply give you the option to bring up a device dialog, which will attempt to identify your scanner. Scanners are tricky beasts. Some scanners work perfectly out of the box, but others require help. You may have to fiddle with your scanner setup to make it show up as a TWAIN or SANE device. Possible issues with specific scanners are beyond the scope of this book. Screen Shots Screen shots are far less problematic than scanners, since there s no device driver to cause difficulties. File . Acquire . Screenshot… brings up the dialog shown in Figure 12-4.
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