TWAIN

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Related to TWAIN: Mark Twain, never the twain shall meet

Twain

1. Mark, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 1835--1910, US novelist and humorist, famous for his classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

2. Shania , real name Eilleen Regina Edwards. born 1965, Canadian country-rock singer; her bestselling recordings include The Woman In Me (1995) Come On Over (1997), and UP! (2002)

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

TWAIN

(graphics, standard)

An image capture API for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems that enables the user to control a scanner or digital camera from image processing software.

TWAIN was first released on 1992-02-29 and is currently ratified at version 2.0 as of 2005-11-28. It is maintained by the TWAIN Working Group.

Kevin Bier, chairman-emeritus of the TWAIN Working Group and the one of the original co-author/editors of TWAIN 1.0, chose the name TWAIN after reading letters by Mark Twain. It was unofficially considered to mean "toolkit without an important name."

The word "twain" is an archaic form meaning "two". It appears in Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard.

The TWAIN Working Group.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

TWAIN

(Technology Without An Interesting Name) A programming interface that lets a graphics application, such as an image editing program or desktop publishing program, activate a scanner, frame grabber or other image-capturing device.

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References in periodicals archive ?

By the end of his life, Twain's literary style was less about poking fun at hypocrisy and became more direct and embittered.

The first truly American Writer Mark Twain had an uncanny eye for human nature

[D]espite its daunting heft, the work provides distinct pleasures for even the casual Twain fan." Laura Skandera Trombley

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

The centerpiece of the collection is Twain's long philosophical essay "What Is Man?", published anonymously in 1906.

Swinging the Pendulum: Mark Twain and Religion

Twain sacked Lyon in 1909, claiming she had tried to steal from him and had attained power of attorney over him by "hypnotising" him for three years.

Mark Twain's link with 'filthy-minded, salacious' secy revealed in memoirs

Dynamic .NET TWAIN supports managing images with the BMP, JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats.

Dynamsoft adds .NET scanning module to portfolio

Now he's bringing Mark Twain to Eugene - again - where you can see him Friday and Saturday night at the Hult Center.

CHANNELING TWAIN

More cumbersome is Vogel's logical fallacy of proving a negative, showing us what Twain could have done, in terms of antisemitism, but didn't.

Mark Twain's Jews

In this chapter and its subsequent one, "Twain's Liberal Faith" Bush delivers the gist of his argument about Twain's religious outlook.

Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age

Bad luck and bad timing had kept the play unproduced during Twain's lifetime.

Express Twain to Broadway

He approaches Twain's travel sketches, including the important Atlantic Monthly "Idle Excursions" series (1877-78), in much the way he does diaries, newspaper accounts, and correspondence, reading them for information, testing their adherence to empirical realities he confirms with other sources.

Hoffmann, Donald. Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda

You don't have to buy that argument fully to agree that Twain (1835-1910) helped literally to bring it all back home.

Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer: the bold deconstruction of a national icon

To learn a lesson from this story that has real value for 21st century metalcasting industry managers, each of us merely needs to replace Twain's concept of an individual's wages with the metalcasting equivalent of top-line revenues, and likewise substitute the concept of an individual's purchasing power with that of business profit.