[poppler] cairo freetype for mingw

[Nerijus Baliunas]

Hello,

I tried to crosscompile poppler with mingw on Fedora, and it did not succeed
because freetype support is disabled in Fedora's mingw32-cairo:

  CXX    CairoFontEngine.lo
In file included from CairoFontEngine.cc:38:0:
CairoFontEngine.h:36:22: fatal error: cairo-ft.h: No such file or directory

I asked to include freetype support in mingw32-cairo and the answer I got is below.
Could the calls to cairo-ft be made optional?

Thanks,
Nerijus

------ Forwarded message ------
From: Erik van Pienbroek <erik at vanpienbroek.nl>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 23:34:16 +0200
Subject: Re: jmorecfg.h INT32
To: "Fedora MinGW (Windows cross-compiler) project" <mingw at lists.fedoraproject.org>

Nerijus Baliunas schreef op wo 13-07-2011 om 23:45 [+0300]:
> Why freetype support is disabled in mingw32-cairo? I recompiled it with the following
> patch and then was able to build poppler:

Freetype is disabled in cairo to avoid dependency bloat. If we enable
it, then it will cause all gtk2/gtk3 applications to start depending on
freetype and fontconfig (as the freetype + fontconfig dependencies will
then be added to the cairo dll). This seems like an useless dependency
to me as the entire gtk stack contains native implementations for the
stuff that freetype and fontconfig provide, so that makes the use of
freetype and fontconfig obsolete.

Up until now there hasn't been any application or library known to us
which really depends on freetype support in cairo. I personally only see
freetype and fontconfig as a temporary method to get applications and
libraries working on win32 until there's native win32 support for font
related stuff. Because of that I don't see a good reason to include
freetype support in cairo.

I just did a checkout of the poppler code to see how dependent poppler
really is on cairo-ft and I only found two calls to a cairo-ft specific
function. The file poppler/CairoFontEngine.cc contains two calls to the
cairo-ft function cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face. Perhaps you
could ask upstream to implement a method to make these 2 calls optional
(so that poppler still remains to work even if cairo-ft is missing) ?

Kind regards,

Erik van Pienbroek
-------- End of message -------