Simulating a TWAIN Device

Question

Our company is using some software that ONLY accepts input from an "Imaging Device" i.e. a TWAIN device (e.g. scanner).

The problem is that we are receiving our files digitally, so using an actual scanner would require us to print, scan, and shred documents that we already have on the computer, but not in the software.

I was curious if anybody has any idea of how we might be able to work around this problem in the meantime. My first thought was to find some way to trick the program into thinking we're using a scanner, via some new 'imaging device' that would just read in the file, and spit it out to the software, but I don't even know where to begin with that.

We put in a feature request, seeing as how this problem should obviously be addressed in the software itself, but the company is notorious for lagging pretty hard when it comes to updates.

Answer 1

The system used by scanners is called TWAIN, so you'd be looking for some sort of virtual twain driver.

A quick google search will produce several hits, I don't have any experience with the software myself so can't advise any further.

Two such providers I found via experts exchange:
http://www.twaintools.de
http://www.scanpoint-usa.com

Answer 2

OK, months late... but in case you are interested, I have a TWAIN driver framework/toolkit that might let you build this fairly easily, depending on just what your scanning app expects, and how hard it is to read images from your digital documents. It's a Microsoft Visual C++ project. No charge but you'd need our permission to redistribute a driver based on it: GenDS

The TWAIN Working Group also has a sample/skeleton driver, I think it's straight C - and used to have some rather bad bugs (Why I wrote mine ;-) but, it might have got better. Look for the "sample data source and application" on their download page.

And of course I have a 'commercial' version of GenDS that I use to write TWAIN drivers on contract.