SANE - Documentation

Manual Pages

The SANE manual page: An introduction into SANE and its components
sane-find-scanner: How to find the device where the scanner is connected
The supported scanners page provides links to the manual pages for the backends (drivers)
The applications (frontends) page provides links to the manual pages for the frontends

FAQ, HOWTO, Tutorial, Saned

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): The SANE FAQ was originally created by Nicolas de Peslouan and is now maintained by ljm Dullaart.
Scanner HOWTO: The Scanner HOWTO was written by Howard Shane to document the steps necessary for access and use of a photographic scanner device on a system running Linux. Despite it's a Linux HOWTO, most of the contents is useful for other platforms, too.
Tutorial: The SANE Scanner Interface: A tutorial on the ideas behind SANE appeared in Linux Journal Issue 47, March 1998. This is an HTML "reprint" of that article. Keep in mind that the article is quite old. The basic ideas are still true, however.
Saned, the SANE Network Scanning Daemon: How to set up the SANE Network Daemon is explained here.

Programmer's Documentation

SANE Standard Version 1.0 (stable)

The document for the SANE API and the network protocol is available in a number of formats:

SANE Standard Version 2.0 (development)

The SANE standard version 2 is currently in development. It shouldn't be used yet for production software because some important parts are still missing. Most of the work to update the standard has been done by Andreas Beck and Oliver Rauch. The discussion takes place on the sane-devel mailing list. The standard is in CVS, see CVS page. The SANE2 standard is in branch DEVEL_2_0_BRANCH-1. Use the following command to get this branch:

  export CVS_RSH=ssh 
  cvs -z3 -d:ext:developername@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/sane co -d sane2 -r DEVEL_2_0_BRANCH-1 sane-backends

There is a TODO list and some snapshots of the standard are available in several formats:

SANE2 standard draft 0.08 as HTML (or tex, dvi, ps)
SANE2 standard draft 0.07 as HTML (or tex, dvi, ps)
SANE2 standard draft 0.06 as tex, dvi, ps
SANE2 standard draft 0.05 as tex, dvi, ps

Miscellaneous Documentation for SANE Programmers

The following documentation is for developers who intend to include their backends/frontend in the SANE distribution or want to use the framework of the SANE distribution.

The page about contributing to SANE contains some basic information on how to start writing a backend.
The sane-backends distribution comes with a file doc/backend-writing.txt which contains a lot of hints on how to write a backend.
The sanei functions should be used by backend programmers whenever possible. They contain code for hardware and file access and lots of little helper functions.