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ImageScience on Windows without the pain

Back in December I posted about ImageScience and RubyInline on Windows. Turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to get this combination working: according to Google Analytics it has become our second most popular blog entry.

A man who knows a lot about Ruby on Windows is Luis Lavena and a day after I posted he very kindly took the time to compile a Windows version of the ImageScience gem and instantly transformed 30 minutes of hard work into about 30 seconds of simplicity!

If you really like doing things the hard way then feel free to read my original post and try compiling everything for yourself, but if all you really want is to get up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible then here are the new ‘easy’ instructions (note: I’m assuming that you have Ruby installed and working in C:\Program Files\Ruby):

1. Install RubyInline

Open a command prompt window and run:

gem install --include-dependencies RubyInline

At the time of writing this will install RubyInline version 3.6.6.

2. Download and install FreeImage

Download the FreeImage binary (at the time of writing version 3.10.0) and unzip to your desktop. Copy FreeImage.dll from the dist directory to C:\Windows\system32.

3. Download and install the Win32 ImageScience gem

Download the Win32 ImageScience gem (at the time of writing version 1.1.3) and copy it to C:\Program Files\Ruby.

Install the gem from a command prompt window using:

gem install "C:\Program Files\Ruby\image_science-1.1.3-i386-mswin32.gem"

You can then delete the gem file from C:\Program Files\Ruby.

4. Test ImageScience

Open a command prompt window, type irb to start a Ruby console and type:

require 'rubygems'
require 'image_science'

After the second require You should see => true as the result: if you get an error then check that you copied the FreeImage DLL to the correct location in step 3.

And that’s it you’re done!