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sane-abaton(5)		  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
     programming 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@alioth-lists.debian.net 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 supported  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 run-
     ning Abaton's scanning desk accessory under MacsBug and tracing  the  MacOS
     SCSI Manager calls it made during image acquisition.

     However,  the  protocol is very similar to, though not compatible 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  scan-
     ner),  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 special 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 corre-
     spond 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.

FILES
     /usr/local/etc/sane.d/abaton.conf
	    The backend configuration file (see also  description  of  SANE_CON-
	    FIG_DIR below).

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

     /usr/local/lib/sane/libsane-abaton.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.  On *NIX  systems,	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 /usr/local/etc/sane.d.	 If  the
	    value  of the environment variable ends with the directory separator
	    character, then the default directories are searched after	the  ex-
	    plicitly  specified  directories.	For  example,  setting SANE_CON-
	    FIG_DIR to "/tmp/config:" would result in directories tmp/config, .,
	    and /usr/local/etc/sane.d being searched (in this order).

     SANE_DEBUG_ABATON
	    If the library was compiled with debug support enabled,  this  envi-
	    ronment variable controls the debug level for this backend.  E.g., a
	    value  of 255 requests all debug output to be printed.  Smaller lev-
	    els 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 mea-
	    surements in millimetres, and floors (rather than rounds) values  to
	    avoid  possible  damage to the scanner mechanism.  Therefore, it may
	    not be possible 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.

     If you have found something that you think is  a  bug,  please  attempt  to
     recreate it with the SANE_DEBUG_ABATON environment variable set to 255, and
     send  a  report  detailing  the  conditions surrounding the bug to sane-de-
     vel@alioth-lists.debian.net.

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 infor-
	    mation 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(5) backend by Milon Firikis.

				   11 Jul 2008			  sane-abaton(5)

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