qpdf/README.windows

Common Setup
============

To be able to run qpdf's test suite, you must have cygwin installed.
This is because qpdf's test suite uses qtest, which requires cygwin
perl on Windows.  (Hopefully a future version of qtest will work with
ActiveState Perl.)  You must have at least perl and gnu diffutils
installed to run the test suite.

As of this writing, the image comparison tests confuse ghostscript in
cygwin, but there's a chance they might work at some point.  If you
want to run them, you need ghostscript and tiff utils as well.  Then
omit --disable-test-compare-images from the configure statements given
below.

Building with MinGW
===================

QPDF is known to build and pass its test suite with MSYS-1.0.11 and
gcc 4.4.0 with C++ support.  You can fully configure and build qpdf in
this environment, though cygwin is required to run the test suite.
You will most likely not be able to build qpdf with mingw using
cygwin, though it's possible that it could be made to work with gcc
-mno-cygwin.

From your MSYS prompt, run

  CFLAGS=-O2 CXXFLAGS=-O2 ./configure --disable-test-compare-images --enable-build-external-libs --with-buildrules=mingw
  make

Omit the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS values if you want debugging information.
You may also want to strip the DLL and executables to create much
smaller files.  When done, you should copy the gcc runtime DLL into
the libqpdf/build directory.  You can find the path to it by running

  objdump -p qpdf/build/qpdf.exe | grep DLL
  type -P libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll

replacing libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll with whatever gcc DLL is shown, if
different.  Redistribution of this DLL is unavoidable as of this
writing; see "Static Runtime" below for details.

From your cygwin prompt, add the absolute path to the libqpdf/build
directory to your PATH.  Make sure you can run the qpdf command by
typing qpdf/build/qpdf and making sure you get a help message rather
than an error loading the DLL or no output at all.  Run the test suite
by typing

  make check GENDEPS=0

from your cygwin prompt.  The GENDEPS=0 is necessary to prevent the
build system in cygwin from trying to interpret the MSYS/Windows paths
embedded in the dependency files.  If all goes well, you should get a
passing test suite.

Building with MSVC .NET 2008 Express
====================================

These instructions would likely work with newer version of MSVC or
with full version of MSVC.  They may also work with .NET 2005.  They
have only been tested with .NET 2008 Express.

It's possible that the MSVC build may work from MSYS, but since cygwin
is needed to run the test suite, these have only been tested from
cygwin.

You should first set up your environment to be able to run MSVC from
the command line.  There is usually a batch file included with MSVC
that does this.  From that cmd prompt, you can start your cygwin
shell.

Configure as follows:

  CC=cl CXX="cl /TP /GR" CPPFLAGS=-DHAVE_VSNPRINTF ./configure --disable-test-compare-images --enable-build-external-libs --with-buildrules=msvc
  make

The -DHAVE_VSNPRINTF is really only required for things that include
zutil.h from zlib.  You don't have to worry about this when compiling
against qpdf with MSVC -- only when building zlib.  It's harmless to
include with the rest of the qpdf build.

Once built, add the full path to the libqpdf/build directory to your
path and run

  make check

to run the test suite.

If you are building with MSVC and want to debug a crash in MSVC's
debugger, first start an instance of Visual C++.  Then run qpdf.  When
the abort/retry/ignore dialog pops up, first attach the process from
within visual C++, and then click Retry in qpdf.

A release version of qpdf is built by default.  You will probably have
to edit msvc.mk to change /MD to /MDd to build a debugging version.
Note that you must redistribute the Microsoft runtime DLLs.  Linking
with static runtime won't work; see "Static Runtime" below for
details.

Static Runtime
==============

Building the DLL and executables with static runtime does not work
with either Visual C++ .NET 2008 (a.k.a. vc9) using /MT or with mingw
(at least as of 4.4.0) using -static-libgcc.  The reason is that, in
both cases, there is static data involved with exception handling, and
when the runtime is linked in statically, exceptions cannot be thrown
across the DLL to EXE boundary.  Since qpdf uses exception handling
extensively for error handling, we have no choice but to redistribute
the C++ runtime DLLs.  Maybe this will be addressed in a future
version of the compilers.