1sane-pint(5) SANE Scanner Access Now Easy sane-pint(5)
2
6 sane-pint - SANE backend for scanners that use the PINT device driver
7
9 The sane-pint library implements a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) back‐
10 end that provides generic access to hand-held and flatbed scanners
11 using the PINT (PINT Is Not Twain) device driver. The PINT driver is
12 being actively developed on the OpenBSD platform, and has been ported
13 to a few other *nix-like operating systems.
14 PINT is designed to provide an ioctl(2) interface to many different
16 scanner types. However, this backend has only been tested with flatbed
17 single-pass scanners, and more work will probably be required to get it
18 to use other scanner types successfully.
19 If have successfully used the PINT driver with your scanner, but it
21 does not work using this SANE backend, please let us know. To do this,
22 send a mail with the relevant information for your scanner to sane-
23 devel@lists.alioth.debian.org. Have a look at http://www.sane-
24 project.org/mailing-lists.html concerning subscription to sane-devel.
25
28 This backend expects device names of the form:
29 special
31 Where special is the UNIX path-name for the special device that corre‐
33 sponds to the scanner. The special device name must be a PINT device
34 or a symlink to such a device. For example, under NetBSD or OpenBSD,
35 such a device name could be /dev/ss0 or /dev/scan0.
36
38 The contents of the pint.conf. file is a list of device names that
39 correspond to PINT scanners. Empty lines and lines starting with a
40 hash mark (#) are ignored. A sample configuration file is shown below:
41 /dev/scanner
43 # this is a comment
44 /dev/ss1
45
47 /etc/sane.d/pint.conf
48 The backend configuration file (see also description of
49 SANE_CONFIG_DIR below).
50 /usr/lib*/sane/libsane-pint.a
52 The static library implementing this backend.
53 /usr/lib*/sane/libsane-pint.so
55 The shared library implementing this backend (present on systems
56 that support dynamic loading).
57
59 SANE_CONFIG_DIR
60 This environment variable specifies the list of directories that
61 may contain the configuration file. Under UNIX, the directories
62 are separated by a colon (`:'), under OS/2, they are separated
63 by a semi-colon (`;'). If this variable is not set, the config‐
64 uration file is searched in two default directories: first, the
65 current working directory (".") and then in /etc/sane.d. If the
66 value of the environment variable ends with the directory sepa‐
67 rator character, then the default directories are searched after
68 the explicitly specified directories. For example, setting
69 SANE_CONFIG_DIR to "/tmp/config:" would result in directories
70 "tmp/config", ".", and "/etc/sane.d" being searched (in this
71 order).
72 SANE_DEBUG_PINT
74 If the library was compiled with debug support enabled, this
75 environment variable controls the debug level for this backend.
76 E.g., a value of 128 requests all debug output to be printed.
77 Smaller levels reduce verbosity.
78
80 sane(7)
81
83 Gordon Matzigkeit, adapted from existing backends written by David Mos‐
84 berger.
85
87 There are minor roundoff errors when adjusting the ranges, since PINT
88 uses units of 1/1200 of an inch, and SANE normally uses millimeters.
89 Symptoms of these errors are skewed images. This should really be
90 fixed (no pun intended) as soon as possible, but I just don't know/care
91 enough about fixed-point representation and roundoff errors to do this
92 correctly. Workaround: use inches as the scanning unit, and everything
93 usually works fine.
94 The PINT 0.5e interface does not provide a way to determine valid
96 ranges for DPI, modes, and scan sizes. So, the SANE backend queries
97 the PINT device, and dynamically discovers valid ranges by doing a
98 binary search. This means that the driver takes longer to initialize
99 than seems necessary.
100 Resetting the scanner does not seem to work (at least not on my HP
102 ScanJet 4p). For that reason, the driver sends a SCIOCRESTART, then
103 gobbles up any remaining input until it hits EOF.
104 Not all of the scanners have been identified (i.e. whether they are
106 flatbed or handheld).
107 X and Y resolutions are assumed to be the same.
109 No testing has been done on three-pass or handheld scanners, or with
111 Automatic Document Feeder support.
112sane-backends 1.0.18 13 May 1998 sane-pint(5)