Document and image scanners have become an integral part of many offices. With a scanner, you can quickly digitize photos, diagrams, and even textual documents for electronic alteration and distribution.
Document and image scanners have become an integral part of many offices. With a scanner, you can quickly digitize photos, diagrams, and even textual documents for electronic alteration and distribution.
Unfortunately, scanners are bulky devices, and for many offices, the demand for scanner use doesn’t justify placing one on every desktop. For this reason, scanners are often a shared resource. Frequently, an office will set aside a single computer as a sort of scanner station: a user walks to this system, scans his or her documents on it, and transfers the scans back to his or her desktop. This configuration has its problems, though — the file transfer process is klunky, and if there’s no spare computer to dedicate to this function, the user whose computer hosts the scanner may be inconvenienced by others’ scanning needs.
Linux’s scanning software, Scanner Access Now Easy (or SANE, http://www.sane-project.org), offers an alternative: network scanning. Like network printing, network scanning enables many computers to access a single scanner as if it were attached locally. Configuring network scanning takes more effort than setting up scanning on a single computer, but the benefits are worthwhile, particularly if your scanner is physically close enough to computers on your network to make feeding documents while sitting at any of the computers convenient.
Understanding the SANE Architecture
SANE is an unusual package. It’s a series of programs that implement and use an API for scanner access. SANE is composed of three types…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
