Common Setup ============ To be able to build qpdf and run its test suite, you must have either Cygwin or MSYS from MinGW (>= 1.0.11) installed. 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. 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. Installing ========== As of this writing, make install doesn't work with Windows since it is hard-coded to use libtool. Until that time, you can install manually by looking at the install target in Makefile and gathering up the appropriate pieces by hand. If building with mingw, be sure to run strip on the DLL and EXE files to make them much smaller. This is not necessary with msvc since it stores debugging information in a separate file. Note that, in both cases, compiling with debugging flags adds extra data to the symbol table and not to the resulting executables. (Compiling with debugging flags, with msvc, is distinct from directing the compiler to use debugging runtime libraries, which does make a difference.) 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.