My own builds for sane-airscan exist for Ubuntu starting from the version 16.04, so I think that technically "backporting" is a trivial task.
Regarding PDF, I purposely trade it off in a favor of lower memory footprint. PDF decompression requires allocation of а full-size buffer for the decompressed image (~1/2Gb for Color A4 at 1200 DPI!), which I'm trying to avoid.
I will reconsider my opinion regarding PDF support, if there are really some devices in existence that cannot scan without it. But so far I'm not convinced that such devices exist.
@gunnarhj,
My own builds for sane-airscan exist for Ubuntu starting from the version 16.04, so I think that technically "backporting" is a trivial task.
Regarding PDF, I purposely trade it off in a favor of lower memory footprint. PDF decompression requires allocation of а full-size buffer for the decompressed image (~1/2Gb for Color A4 at 1200 DPI!), which I'm trying to avoid.
I will reconsider my opinion regarding PDF support, if there are really some devices in existence that cannot scan without it. But so far I'm not convinced that such devices exist.