[cairo] Success with Cairo on Win9x

brianp at sginet.com brianp at sginet.com
Mon Feb 5 11:59:04 PST 2007


Here is a little info of my progress in playing around with Cairo on Win9x
(which is supposedly unsupported).

I am able to successfully use Cairo on Win9x if I render to an image buffer
first. The only thing that doesn't work is the text rendering (this is
because it uses the Unicode GetGlyphOutlineW functions exclusively). So I
decided to give FreeType a try. There are some issues using Cairo+FreeType
on Win32, but long story short - I can successfully use Cairo+FreeType on
Win9x when rendering to an image buffer with no problems.

When trying to use FreeType on Win32, it looks like the FreeType module in
Cairo wants to compile in some fontconfig stuff. However, fontconfig has no
Win32 port that I can find. Also, fontconfig seems to be totally separate
from the FreeType code, and unnecessary in every way on Win32, it is only
mixed into the same source files. To solve that problem, I just #if
0...#endif'd the fontconfig code and now the FreeType module compiles on
Win32 without a hitch.

So, I propose that the fontconfig specific code be wrapped up in a separate
cairo feature #define so that it can be compiled separately from the
FreeType code. With this in place, everyone should be able to use Cairo on
Win9x as long as they render to an image buffer first and then blit that to
a Windows HDC.

Any chances of getting a separate cairo feature #define for fontconfig?

Thanks!



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