[poppler] Printing with poppler on Windows

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dimecres 07 Maig 2008, Peter Åstrand va escriure:
> (Entire thread available from
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.poppler/1426)
>
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Jonathan Kew 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 decided to make another try at this now. It's not going well. As I
> understand it, Freetype is a hard dependency for Poppler on Windows, but
> Fontconfig is not. 

As far as i know, yes.

> So, the plan is to leave out Fontconfig. But, Cairo 
> doesn't let me build with Freetype but not Fontconfig:
>
> checking for cairo's FreeType font backend...
> checking for FONTCONFIG... no
> no
> checking whether cairo's FreeType font backend could be enabled... no
> (requires fontconfig)
> configure: error: requested FreeType font backend could not be enabled
>
> Any ideas?
>
> In general, using Poppler+Freetype+Cairo+Pixman seems like a quite complex
> combination, just for the task of printing a PDF to GDI. For example,
> Cairo seems to have built in support for using the Win32 font system
> instead of Freetype, but unfortunately this path is not possible with
> Poppler, as it requires Freetype. But perhaps I'm underestimating how
> difficult this task really is.

Not much really much ideas here, never worked on windows, but your 
possibilities are:
 * "Fix" cairo to be able of building freetype without fontconfig
 * "Fix" poppler to be able of building in windows without freetype (that 
would mean using wathever windows uses to render fonts, not an easy task i'd 
say)

Not being a cairo nor a windows expert i'd say the first would be easier as 
freetype is not really depending on fontconfig, so that must be a cairo self 
imposed limitation.

Sorry i can not help more.

Albert

>
>
> Regards,
> ---
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