qpdf/README.windows

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.  If you want to build
with Microsoft Visual C++, either Cygwin or MSYS will do.  If you want
to build with MinGW, you must use MSYS rather than Cygwin.

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.  The image comparison tests have not been tried under MSYS.

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

or

  ./config-mingw

and then

  make

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

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.  You may follow these
instructions from either Cygwin or from MSYS.

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

or

  ./config-msvc

and then

  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.

Runtime DLLs
============

Both build methods create executables and DLLs that are dependent on
the compiler's runtime DLLs.  You can find out which DLLs are required
by using objdump.  For any DLLs that are not standard on any Windows
system, you will need to copy those into the directory with the exe
and the qpdf DLL in order for the application to work outside the
development environment.  You don't need KERNEL32.dll, or msvcrt.dll
as those are standard.

To discover which DLLs you need, you can run

  objdump -p qpdf/build/qpdf.exe | grep DLL

To find the path to the DLL, you can use type -P, as in

  type -P libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll

replacing libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll with whatever gcc DLL is shown, if
different.  For MSVC, you will probably need two DLLs.  Keep in mind
that Microsoft does not allow redistribution of the debugging DLLs.
qpdf's build does not depend on them by default, however.

Redistribution of the runtime DLL is unavoidable as of this writing;
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.