SANE Scanner Access Now Easy sane-abaton(5)
NAME
sane-abaton - SANE backend for Abaton flatbed scanners
DESCRIPTION
The sane-abaton library implements a SANE (Scanner Access
Now Easy) backend that provides access to Abaton flatbed
scanners. At present, only the Scan 300/GS (8bit, 256 levels
of gray) is fully supported, due to the absence of program-
ming information. The Scan 300/S (black and white) is
recognized, but support for it is untested.
If you own a Abaton scanner other than the ones listed above
that works with this backend, or if you own an Abaton
scanner that does not work with this backend, please contact
sane-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org with the model number, so
that arrangements can be made to include support for it.
Have a look at http:/www.sane-project.org/mailing-
lists.html concerning subscription to sane-devel.
Abaton is out of business, and these scanners are not sup-
ported by Everex (the parent company of Abaton), nor is
there any programming information to be found. This driver
is therefore based on information obtained by running
Abaton's scanning desk accessory under MacsBug and tracing
the MacOS SCSI Manager calls it made during image acquisi-
tion.
However, the protocol is very similar to, though not compa-
tible with, the one used by the Apple scanners, therefore,
if this backend is ever extended to support the other Abaton
models (they also made a color flatbed scanner), it may be
possible to fill in some "missing pieces" from the (quite
detailed) Apple scanner documentation.
DEVICE NAMES
This backend expects device names of the form:
special
Where special is the path-name for the special device that
corresponds to a SCSI scanner. For SCSI scanners, the spe-
cial device name must be a generic SCSI device or a symlink
to such a device. Under Linux, such a device name takes a
format such as /dev/sga or /dev/sg0, for example. See
sane-scsi(5) for details.
CONFIGURATION
The contents of the abaton.conf file is a list of device
names that correspond to Abaton scanners. Empty lines and
lines starting with a hash mark (#) are ignored. See sane-
scsi(5) on details of what constitutes a valid device name.
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SANE Scanner Access Now Easy sane-abaton(5)
FILES
/etc/sane.d/abaton.conf
The backend configuration file (see also description of
SANECONFIGDIR below).
/usr/lib/sane/libsane-abaton.a
The static library implementing this backend.
/usr/lib/sane/libsane-abaton.so
The shared library implementing this backend (present
on systems that support dynamic loading).
ENVIRONMENT
SANECONFIGDIR
This environment variable specifies the list of direc-
tories 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 direc-
tories are searched after the explicitly specified
directories. For example, setting SANECONFIGDIR to
"/tmp/config:" would result in directories
"tmp/config", ".", and "/etc/sane.d" being searched (in
this order).
SANEDEBUGABATON
If the library was compiled with debug support enabled,
this environment variable controls the debug level for
this backend. E.g., a value of 255 requests all debug
output to be printed. Smaller levels reduce verbosity.
BUGS
There are a few known ones, and definitely some unknown
ones.
Scan area miscalculations
For the sake of programmer efficiency, this backend
handles all measurements in millimetres, and floors
(rather than rounds) values to avoid possible damage to
the scanner mechanism. Therefore, it may not be possi-
ble to scan to the extreme right or bottom edges of the
page.
Cancelling the scan
This might not work correctly, or it might abort the
frontend. The former is more likely than the latter.
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SANE Scanner Access Now Easy sane-abaton(5)
If you have found something that you think is a bug, please
attempt to recreate it with the SANEDEBUGABATON environ-
ment variable set to 255, and send a report detailing the
conditions surrounding the bug to sane-
devel@lists.alioth.debian.org.
TODO
Implement non-blocking support
Finish reverse-engineering the MacOS driver
This will allow me to add support for other models with
reasonable confidence that it will work, as well as to
fully exploit the information returned by the INQUIRY
command.
SEE ALSO
sane(7), sane-scsi(5), scanimage(1)
AUTHOR
The sane-abaton backend was partially written by David
Huggins-Daines, based on the sane-apple backend by Milon
Firikis.
ATRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:
ATRIBUTE TYPE ATRIBUTE VALUE
Availability SUNWsane-backend
Interface Stability Uncommitted
NOTES
Source for SANE is available on http:/opensolaris.org.
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