By default, Skanlite tries to identify zones in the preview which the user would want to scan. This is a good idea, but in my experience, it's more annoying than useful. I remember Kooka had an equivalent feature, which I found great and used sometimes, but you had to request it to operate. I just scanned a pretty simple document with a 2-columns table, and Skanlite suggests to scan each column in its own zone, which is obviously not what I want to do. I'm sure improvements to the AI are possible, but this can never be perfect, and will surely take time. Until behavior is significantly improved, 2 things can help: 1. Turn off the feature by default. 2. Make it easy to cancel its effect. Skanlite currently offers a way to turn the feature off in the preferences, but people will probably take a while to look there. Skanlite also offers a quick way to temporarily cancel the feature's effect, but I only found it today when reading the manual. By right-clicking on the preview, one is offered to "Clear Selections". This works great, I just think it should be made much more obvious. All of the contextual menu items are also available in the bottom toolbar, *except* for Clear Selections, which I believe is the most useful. This almost looks like a bug. Note that the icon's meaning is not entirely clear. Since there there is lots of horizontal room left in the bottom toolbar (at least here, where Skanlite is fullscreen), I recommend to add the "Clear Selections" label too.
You might be right that the "Clear Selections" should be added to the toolbar. I developed Skanlite on a netbook and there the screen estate is really important. I'll have a look. The automatic selection is actually a bit hard to get right ;) As my main scanning needs has been to scan photos and not documents, the interface is optimized for photos. I have been waiting for somebody else to take up the document scanning part but nobody has stepped up to do that.
Git commit 6caec171a002f93b77c9fcddcdf2da3f2f898ec8 by Kåre Särs. Committed on 15/08/2013 at 19:18. Pushed by sars into branch 'master'. Add the clear selection preview window action also as a tool button FIXED-IN: KDE 4.12 GUI: M +8 -1 libksane/ksane_widget.cpp M +1 -0 libksane/ksane_widget_private.cpp M +1 -0 libksane/ksane_widget_private.h http://commits.kde.org/libksane/6caec171a002f93b77c9fcddcdf2da3f2f898ec8
I verified this in libksane 4.12.3. Thank you Kåre.