sane-pint5

Overview

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 [email protected]. 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:

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:

Files

@CONFIGDIR@/pint.conf

The backend configuration file (see also description of SANE_CONFIG_DIR below).

@LIBDIR@/libsane-pint.a

The static library implementing this backend.

@LIBDIR@/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 @CONFIGDIR@. 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 "@CONFIGDIR@" 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.