[poppler] Printing with poppler on Windows

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Feb 2008, at 9:28 am, Peter Åstrand wrote:

> The first step is trying to build the existing tools for Windows,  
> using
> our MinGW cross compile environment. I've basically succeeded,  
> though it
> was a lot of work:
>
> * Build libxml2
> * Build Freetype
> * Build Fontconfig
> * Build Cairo
> * Build poppler
>
> Are all these dependencies really necessary? Does Freetype/ 
> Fontconfig work
> well on Windows?

Freetype works well. You can skip building it yourself by getting a  
pre-built version if you like; that's what I've done lately, and it's  
working well for me (using a GnuWin32 installation of FT).

Fontconfig works but is rather "foreign". If you build poppler with  
MSVC, it looks like it avoids Fontconfig in favor of native Windows  
APIs. Unfortunately, the config doesn't currently do this for MinGW  
builds.

I've tweaked my MinGW build so as to work without Fontconfig, but I  
don't currently have all the Windows font stuff linking properly.  
This is not a big issue for me right now, as the PDFs I'm working  
with have all fonts embedded, but it's obviously something to fix  
before suggesting this as a real patch.

JK