What is TWAIN ?

TWAIN is the interface standard for Windows that allows imaging hardware devices (such as scanners and digital cameras) to communicate with image processing software. Prior to TWAIN, image acquisition devices all came with their own proprietary software.

The word TWAIN means "two items of the same kind", contrary to popular belief it is not an acronym for "Technology Without An Interesting Name".

Nearly all image processing software today is TWAIN compliant. If your software supports TWAIN, you will find an "Acquire" or "Scan" command in the menus or toolbars.

This command provides access to any TWAIN hardware devices installed on the system. Although the software appearance and capabilities for each device will vary, the TWAIN Acquire command calls up the hardware interfacing software, and places the acquired image into the image processing software, without the need for the image to first be saved to disk.

As an alternative to Twain, ISIS or Kofax interfaces may be used.

Scanners from Fujitsu, Kodak and others use the TWAIN interface.

Document Scanners

Document Imaging

Alliance BatchScan provides volume scanning for TWAIN compatible imaging scanners. Documents may be scanned for Indexing into Alliance Imager document_management or Alliance PaperChase records_management or saved into a Windows folder. Documents are saved as multi-page TIFF files

Document Scanning software