Documentation : FAQTable of Contents
1. Kooka
F: What is Kooka?
A: Kooka is a program written for the
KDE Desktop Environment that brings scanner functionality to
the KDE desktop.
F: How old is Kooka?
A: Development started in 1999. Before 1999 there were two other scanner
software projects started by the author.
F: Why was it started?
A: There was a scan program KScan written by Ivan Shvedunov. It was
a begin. But unfortunately, not much scanner were supported by that
program and so I started to have a look into the sources. A lot of
interesting stuff was in there, like the 'walking ants' which are
still there.
F: Why is it called Kooka?
A: There was a lot of discussion about the name. The programs first
name was KScan which lead to confusion because of Ivan's KScan. Finally
we found Kooka which is short for a funny bird living in Australia and
that was fine for all.
2. Libkscan
F: What is libkscan?
A: Libkscan is a KDE library which can be used by every KDE program
that wants to offer scan support.
F: Why is there libkscan and Kooka?
A: In the beginning there was only Kooka. But it turned out soon that
a library which offers functionality to programs is the better way and
many functions went from Kooka to the library now available for a more
general purpose. Kooka uses many parts from the libkscan like the image
viewer widget or the SANE support.
F: What is the Program of libkscan?
A: Since libkscan is a library, there is no executable in it. Programs
need to link to it to use and offer the functionality of libkscan.
F: How do I add scan support to my KDE application?
A: It's easy. You need to open a ScanDialog in your program, which is
comes from kdelibs/KIO. See The KScanDialog-Docu for further information.
3. Kooka Usage
3.1 Starting and running
F: How do I start Kooka?
A: Either use the KDE start menu and go to the 'Graphics' section were
you should find Kooka (if not, check if you have Kooka installed, some
distributions do not install Kooka by default). If you do not find a
menu entry, try starting it from the command line by simply typing
Kooka.
F: Which versions of KDE and Qt do I need?
A: Always the latest version is recommended ;-)
F: On startup, Kooka complains that no scanner was found. What's on?
A: Huh, that is a very difficult question to answer in two sentences.
Kooka (or more precisely libkscan) needs a working SANE installation on your
computer. SANE means
Scanner Access Now Easy and is the only working open source
scanner support project I know. Please check the SANE Websites for information
about scanner installation or ask on the SANE mailinglist.
F: I do not have a (supported) scanner. Can I start and use Kooka anyway?
A: Oh yes, you can. You can use Kooka's image viewer capabilities
and the gallery. Simply import images to the gallery.
Kooka can be started in gallery mode event if you have a scanner
with command line switch -g
F: Does Kooka need much memory or other system ressources?
A: Kooka should not use more memory or other ressources than other
KDE programs. But since Kooka loads images which can be very large,
the memory consumption might grow.
3.2 The Gallery
F: What the hell is 'the Gallery'?
A: The Gallery is Kooka's image archive where it stores scanned images.
We simply call it a gallery ;) as it is a place housing a lot of images.
F: What is it in technical terms?
A: It is nothing but a directory containing the image files. It can
be found at $KDEHOME/share/apps/ScanImages/.
F: Does Kooka support more Galleries on other locations?
A: Not yet. But this is a planed feature. (Nov. 2003).
F: How do I get images out of Kooka's Gallery?
A: Use drag and drop with Konqueror or select the menu item 'Save Image'
to save the image wherever you want ;)
3.3 OCR
F: What is OCR?
A: OCR is short for 'Optical Character Recognition' which means, that a
computer program (the OCR-software) tries to 'read' an image and convert
the pixel points to text which can be edited than.
F: Is Kooka OCR software?
A: No. Kooka just acts as a front end to different OCR engines.
Kooka calls external OCR programs or uses libraries.
The first supported OCR program was gocr,
which was written by Joerg Schulenburg, but nowadays there are others.
It is one of Kooka's design targets to support as many OCR engines as
possible.
F: How good is the recognition?
A: Well, that depends. As long as everything is good, the results are
very good. Try to do a good, non skewed scan in black and white mode.
Make sure that single characters are not smaller than 20 pixels on
the result images.
Note that there must be decided between character detection and
page analysis. While the results of the character detection are
quite good, the efforts for page analysis are still high.
3.4 The Save Assistant
F: What is the Save Assistant?
A: This is Kooka's part that saves new scanned images for you to
disk. Your advantage is that you do not need to enter a file name
for every crappy scan you do. Kooka does that for you. Moreover
the Save Assistant tries to help you to find the approbiate image
save format for your image.
F: I never see the save assistant. Where is it?
A: It appears after every scan. But soon you will have enough of it
and than you can tell it to not appear again but save the new images
in the same format as the last ones. Having done that, the assistant
will not further annoy you. If you want to see it again, go to the
Kooka settings where you find a checkbox to switch it on again.
4. The KDE Scan Service
F: What is a Scan Service
A: The scan service is offers scanner support to all KDE applications
that want to use it. Most of KDE's graphic applications have a menu
item 'Scan Image' that opens a dialog which accesses the scanner.
F: I want to buy a new scanner. Do I have to get used to a completely
new scanner software as it is with Twain?
A: No. One of the most amazing points with SANE is that it offers the
same programming interface for every scanner. That makes it easy to
implement programs for many different scanners. The scanners might
have different options and parmeters but they are all covered by the
same GUI where you can tweak them around.
5. General questions
F: How can I help?
A: Well, if you are a software developer, drop me a mail, if you like
to help. It would be perfect to have other developers working on Kooka as
well as on other KDE issues. But also if you are not a coder, you can
help: Write or translate documentation for example. See
The KDE Homepage for more details about this.
But the most important
is: Tell the people about the idea of open source and free software.
F: When was the last update of this FAQ?
A: It was in Nov. 2003
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