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2011.11.27

Using the HP 4470c Scanner Under Windows 7

Neither Hewlett Packard nor Microsoft Windows 7 offer native support for my HP 4470c scanner. Throwing a working scanner away to buy a new one only because some software was missing seemed like a waste, so I looked for an alternative solution. This is how I made it work using SANE, an open source framework for scanners.

  1. I downloaded the SANE back-end source code from here.
  2. I compiled the code under Cygwin, the collection of tools that provide a Linux look and feel environment for Windows. This involved the following steps.
    1. Installing Cygwin's libusb-win32 library.
    2. Modifying my PC's PATH to move the Cygwin bin directory in front of the ActiveState Perl site/bin one, because Perl's was interfering by supplying a useless version of gcc that wasn't using the Cygwin-installed libraries.
    3. Running the usual ./configure step.
    4. Put within single quotes the latex and dvips commands in doc/Makefile, because the spaces and brackets in the Program Files (x86) MikTeX installation directory were causing the shell convulse.
    5. Running make install.
  3. I downloaded and installed the libusb-win32 device driver for my scanner. This involved
    1. unpacking the binary in a temporary directory, and
    2. running the bin/inf-wizard.exe in order to create a driver for my scanner.
At the end of this process I could scan pages using a command like 
scanimage >file.pnm

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Creative Commons License Last modified: Sunday, November 27, 2011 7:54 pm
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.