sane-pint(5)             SANE Scanner Access Now Easy             sane-pint(5)



NAME
       sane-pint - SANE backend for scanners that use the PINT device driver

DESCRIPTION
       The sane-pint library implements a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy)
       backend that provides generic access to hand-held and flatbed scanners
       using the PINT (PINT Is Not Twain) device driver.  The PINT driver is
       being actively developed on the OpenBSD platform, and has been ported
       to a few other *nix-like operating systems.

       PINT is designed to provide an ioctl(2) interface to many different
       scanner types.  However, this backend has only been tested with flatbed
       single-pass scanners, and more work will probably be required to get it
       to use other scanner types successfully.

       If have successfully used the PINT driver with your scanner, but it
       does not work using this SANE backend, please let us know.  To do this,
       send a mail with the relevant information for your scanner to
       sane-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org.  Have a look at
       http://www.sane-project.org/mailing-lists.html concerning subscription
       to sane-devel.


DEVICE NAMES
       This backend expects device names of the form:

              special

       Where special is the UNIX path-name for the special device that
       corresponds to the scanner.  The special device name must be a PINT
       device or a symlink to such a device.  For example, under NetBSD or
       OpenBSD, such a device name could be /dev/ss0 or /dev/scan0.

CONFIGURATION
       The contents of the pint.conf.  file is a list of device names that
       correspond to PINT scanners.  Empty lines and lines starting with a
       hash mark (#) are ignored.  A sample configuration file is shown below:

              /dev/scanner
              # this is a comment
              /dev/ss1

FILES
       /etc/sane.d/pint.conf
              The backend configuration file (see also description of
              SANE_CONFIG_DIR below).

       /usr/local/lib/sane/libsane-pint.a
              The static library implementing this backend.

       /usr/local/lib/sane/libsane-pint.so
              The shared library implementing this backend (present on systems
              that support dynamic loading).

ENVIRONMENT
       SANE_CONFIG_DIR
              This environment variable specifies the list of directories that
              may contain the configuration file.  Under UNIX, the directories
              are separated by a colon (`:'), under OS/2, they are separated
              by a semi-colon (`;').  If this variable is not set, the
              configuration file is searched in two default directories:
              first, the current working directory (".") and then in
              /etc/sane.d.  If the value of the environment variable ends with
              the directory separator character, then the default directories
              are searched after the explicitly specified directories.  For
              example, setting SANE_CONFIG_DIR to "/tmp/config:" would result
              in directories "tmp/config", ".", and "/etc/sane.d" being
              searched (in this order).

       SANE_DEBUG_PINT
              If the library was compiled with debug support enabled, this
              environment variable controls the debug level for this backend.
              E.g., a value of 128 requests all debug output to be printed.
              Smaller levels reduce verbosity.

SEE ALSO
       sane(7)

AUTHOR
       Gordon Matzigkeit, adapted from existing backends written by David
       Mosberger.

BUGS
       There are minor roundoff errors when adjusting the ranges, since PINT
       uses units of 1/1200 of an inch, and SANE normally uses millimeters.
       Symptoms of these errors are skewed images.  This should really be
       fixed (no pun intended) as soon as possible, but I just don't know/care
       enough about fixed-point representation and roundoff errors to do this
       correctly.  Workaround: use inches as the scanning unit, and everything
       usually works fine.

       The PINT 0.5e interface does not provide a way to determine valid
       ranges for DPI, modes, and scan sizes.  So, the SANE backend queries
       the PINT device, and dynamically discovers valid ranges by doing a
       binary search.  This means that the driver takes longer to initialize
       than seems necessary.

       Resetting the scanner does not seem to work (at least not on my HP
       ScanJet 4p).  For that reason, the driver sends a SCIOCRESTART, then
       gobbles up any remaining input until it hits EOF.

       Not all of the scanners have been identified (i.e. whether they are
       flatbed or handheld).

       X and Y resolutions are assumed to be the same.

       No testing has been done on three-pass or handheld scanners, or with
       Automatic Document Feeder support.



                                  14 Jul 2008                     sane-pint(5)
