Xsane can be run as a stand-alone program or through the gimp image manipulation program. in stand-alone mode, xsane can save an image to a file in a variety of image formats, serve as a frontend to a fax program, or send an image to a printer.

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 contains debug files needed by xsane.