Diagnosing and Reporting TwainSave Problems

In some cases, a TWAIN device either fails to acquire the image, or some other error occurs that prevents the images from being acquired.  If problems persists, the first line of defense in diagnosing the problem is to use -verbose option.

The -verbose option will output messages to either the screen, or if the -verboselog is specified, to a file.  These messages will denote what operation TwainSave is doing, and whether the operation was successful or unsuccessful.

The next, more detailed measure is to use the -diagnose and -diagnoselog options.  This will give much more low-level, detailed information as to what TwainSave and your TWAIN device is doing during the acquisition process.  The information contained in the -diagnose log may be a little overwhelming, but it contains a wealth of information that can root out problems with either the way TwainSave is operating, or how your TWAIN device is operating when asked to acquire an image or set of images.

Transfer Mode Issues

If there is a general issue retrieving pages from the TWAIN device, you can try changing the transfer mode using the -transfermode option, as changing the transfer mode to "buffered" (option 1) may clarify some issues when transferring an image with TwainSave.

Negative Images

Sometimes an image turns out as a "negative" or reverse-colored image when it is not desired.  This is sometimes the case when a buggy TWAIN driver is used when -noui is specified.  To remedy this situation, you can try the -negate option to reverse the image colors.  Please note that the issue with negative images appearing are a fault of the driver, not with TwainSave.  TwainSave is used to attempt to correct the image.

Also, if the image file being saved is in TIFF format, be aware that the viewer you are using to view the TIFF file may be faulty, and not the fault of the image.  There are older TIFF viewers that do not recognize reversed images (and other TIFF aspects such as multiple pages) properly.  The free IrfanView program (http://www.irfanview.com) is frequently being updated, so this program is a recommended viewer of TIFF files.

Things to do before reporting bugs to Dynarithmic Software

Before reporting any problems to the TwainSave technical support team, make sure that you have run your program first with the -verbose option (which may reveal what the error is to you right away), then if this does not reveal the reason for the problem, run the same TwainSave command-line options with the additional -diagnose option with the value of the -diagnose set to 4 (and also, set the log file where the diagnostics will be written by using the -diagnoselog option).  Then when reporting errors, you have a diagnostic log for the tech support team to study and give reasons and solutions to the problem.

To report errors or problems with TwainSave, please contact support@dynarithmic.com and have available -diagnose log and -verbose log files.

If you happen to experience a crash of the TwainSave application, you should still generate diagnostic logs as outlined above, since the diagnostic log will show what has occurred before the crash was encountered..  Also, please see the Catastrophic TwainSave Errors - Crash Dump section for cases where a crash dump file is generated on a crash of TwainSave.