Sane stands for "scanner access now easy" and is an application programming interface (api) that provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware (flatbed scanner, hand-held scanner, video- and still-cameras, frame-grabbers, etc.). the sane standard is free and its discussion and development are open to everybody. the current source code is written to support several operating systems, including gnu/linux, os/2, win32 and various unices and is available under the gnu general public license (commercial applications and backends are welcome, too, however).

this package includes the backends for many scanners. a libsane-extras package containing some not-yet-included backends is available separately.

graphical frontends for sane are available in the packages sane and xsane. command line frontend scanimage, saned and sane-find-scanner are available in the sane-utils package.