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.

scanimage >file.pnm

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