[poppler] Printing with poppler on Windows

[Krzysztof Kowalczyk]

I wrote Sumatra and native windows makefile for poppler (using slash
backend) and here's my advice: drop cairo and use slash backend on
windows. It's much easier to get working because it only depends on
libjpeg + zlib + freetype and when I checked in visual studio makefile
some time ago, it was working. I also provide pre-compiled
libjpeg+zlib+freetype libraries and detailed build instructions
(http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/README.windows).

I don't know if it still works - some changes might have broken
windows build, but I don't believe it would be hard to fix.

Your other option is mupdf. I recently contributed native windows
build there as well and it has the same dependencies on windows
(libjpeg+zlib+freetype).

--- kjk

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 2:24 AM, Peter Åstrand <astrand at cendio.se> wrote:
>
>  (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. 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.
>
>
>  Regards,
>
>
> ---
>  Peter Åstrand           ThinLinc Chief Developer
>  Cendio AB               http://www.cendio.se
>  Wallenbergs gata 4
>  583 30 Linköping        Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
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