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

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

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.

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

Then 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.
It has also been attempted to build qpdf with /MT, but it does not
pass its test suite in this configuration.  I have not investigated.