TwainSave

TwainSave is a free, open source version of Dynarithmic Software's TwainSave command-line program to access TWAIN devices and convert scanned pages to image files (BMP, JPEG, TIFF, etc). This version is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Close to all of the functionality that is in the commercial version of TwainSave is implemented in the open source version.

Note that there are two copies of the TwainSave executable files for each architecture and TWAIN device (32-bit and 64-bit). To access 32-bit TWAIN devices, you must run the 32-bit version of TwainSave, and similarly, to access 64-bit TWAIN devices, you must run the 64-bit version of TwainSave.

In the 32-bit version of TwainSave, you will see twainsave.exe, and twainsave-opensource.exe, and for the 64-bit version of TwainSave, the executable files are twainsave-opensource.exe and twainsave64.exe.

Getting started

There currently isn't an installation package, so the installation will be manual (but very simple).

To get started,

1. For 32-bit TwainSave, copy the files from this folder to an empty folder on your computer.

2. You can either run twainsave.exe directly from that folder, or set a PATH to the folder and run twainsave.exe.

3. For 64-bit TwainSave, create another empty folder and follow steps 1) and 2). You can also set a PATH to this folder, but be aware to run twainsave64.exe and not simply twainsave.exe if you have set a path to both the 32-bit and 64-bit folders.

4. If when running TwainSave, you receive an error stating that VCRUNTIME140.dll and MSVCP140.dll are missing, you will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributables for X86 if you are running the 32-bit TwainSave, and X64 if you will be running the 64-bit version of TwainSave.

The 32-bit twainsave.exe is exactly the same as the 32-bit twainsave-opensource.exe, likewise the 64-bit twainsave64.exe is exactly the same executable as the 64 bit twainsave-opensource.exe. The reason for the similar files is that the original help documentation referred to twainsave.exe and twainsave64.exe and not twainsave-opensource.exe.

5. To get help for Twainsave: a) issue the --help option to list the various options available. For example: twainsave --help or twainsave64 --help from the command-line will list the options available.

   b) Note that there is also a Windows-based help file that explains most of these options. This help file is periodically updated.

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The current open source TwainSave version is 1.2.0.

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Differences in this version and the commercial version of TwainSave

1. The command-line parameters use the traditional Unix-style double-hyphen option specifier. So for example, instead of this: twainsave -filename test.bmp

The option for the open source version will be twainsave --filename test.bmp

2. The --details listing differs from the commercial version's -details setting in two major ways:
   a) The --details is in JSON format.
   b) The output will by default go to the console instead of having to specify a file.

For item b), to output to a file just requires you to run twainsave-opensource and redirect the --details output to a file. For example:

twainsave --details > details.log

will write the details to the file details.log

3. The --thumbnail option has been renamed to --scale.

4. Running twainsave.exe without command-line parameters will default to displaying the TWAIN Select Source dialog box. If a device is selected, will allow the user to acquire and save the file to a BMP file. The resulting BMP file will be have a randomly generated file name (using a .BMP extension).

5. Running twainsave.exe without a --filename setting, but with a --filetype setting: If a device is selected, the name of the file will be randomly generated, with a file extension that matches the file type specified.

   For example: twainsave --filetype pdf will result in a file created with a random name, with a .pdf extension.

6. Note that the random names will have as the filename in a 128-bit GUID format. For example:

6b29fc40-ca47-1067-b31d-00dd010662da.pdf

would be a randomly generated pdf file.

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Building TwainSave from source

If you want to build the source code, the requirements are the same as building the source for the Dynarithmic TWAIN library found here.

1. Note that the building of the source is initially set up using CMake. You can use CMake or CMake-GUI to configure and generate the Visual Studio project files. Note that you will need either one of the following compilers to build Twainsave successfully: a) Visual Studio 2019 b) Visual Studio 2022

2. You will need an installation of the Boost C++ library, version 1.70 or greater (see the link to building DTWAIN for more information).

3. The environment variables used by the build process are as follows:

BOOST_INCLUDE_DIR
BOOST_LIBRARY_DIR_V142_64
BOOST_LIBRARY_DIR_V142_32
BOOST_LIBRARY_DIR_V143_64
BOOST_LIBRARY_DIR_V143_32

See the DTWAIN source main page to see how to set these enviroment variables to point to the Boost headers and library directories.

4. Since TwainSave relies on the DTWAIN library to run successfully, you must ensure that dtwain32u.dll and dtwain64u.dll are available at run time. Along with these files, the text resources should be made available.

You can get these runtime files directly from the binaries folder, and either placing the files directly in the path where the TwainSave executable is existing, or place those files in a directory specified by the PATH environment variable.

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To-do list

• Implement the --verboselog option.