path: root/README-windows.txt

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

You may need to disable antivirus software to run qpdf's test suite.

To be able to build qpdf and run its test suite, you must have MSYS
from MinGW installed, and you must have ActiveState Perl.  Here's what
I did on my system:

Install ActiveState perl.

Grab the latest mingw-get-inst.  From the installation wizard, choose
to install developer kit, C, and C++ support.  Once installed, you
will have an icon to start an msys shell.  From the msys shell, run

mingw-get install msys-unzip msys-zip mingw32-make

Then replace perl and make with the appropriate versions:

mv /bin/perl.exe /bin/msys-perl.exe
mv /bin/make.exe /bin/msys-make.exe
mv /mingw/bin/mingw32-make.exe /mingw/bin/make.exe

Make sure perl --version shows ActiveState perl.

To install MinGW-w64, first install msys and mingw32 as above.

From MinGW-w64 download page, go to "Toolchains targeting
Win64/Automated Builds" and find the latest mingw-w64 that runs under
i686-mingw.  It will be called something like
mingw-w64-bin_i686-mingw_yyyymmdd.zip.  The compiler binaries are
32-bit, which (of course) runs on 64-bit Windows.  Extract this under
C:\MinGW-w64, and add C:\MinGW-w64\bin and C:\MinGW-w64\lib\mingw to
the path.

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, and you
will need to add --enable-test-compare-images from the configure
statements given below.

Jian Ma <stronghorse@tom.com> has generously provided a port of QPDF
that works with Microsoft VC6.  Several changes are required, but they
are well documented in his port.  You can find the VC6 port in the
contrib area of the qpdf download area.  It may not always be
up-to-date with the latest official qpdf release.


External Libraries
==================

In order to build qpdf, you must have copies of zlib and pcre.  The
easy way to get them is to download them from the qpdf download area.
There are packages called external-libs-bin.zip and
external-libs-src.zip.  If you are building with MSVC 2010 or MINGW,
you can just extract the qpdf-external-libs-bin.zip zip file into the
top-level qpdf source tree.  Note that you need the 2012-06-20 version
(at least) to build qpdf 3.0 or greater since this includes 64-bit
libraries.  It will create a directory called external-libs which
contains header files and precompiled libraries.  Passing
--enable-external-libs to ./configure (which is done automatically if
you follow the instructions below) is sufficient to find them.

You can also obtain pcre and zlib directly on your own and install
them.  If you are using mingw, you can just set CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, and
LIBS when you run ./configure so that it can find the header files and
libraries.  If you are building with msvc and you want to do this, it
probably won't work because ./configure doesn't know how to interpret
LDFLAGS and LIBS properly for MSVC (though qpdf's own build system
does).  In this case, you can probably get away with cheating by
passing --enable-external-libs to ./configure and then just editing
CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, LIBS in the generated autoconf.mk file.  Note that
you should use UNIX-like syntax (-I, -L, -l) even though this is not
what cl takes on the command line.  qpdf's build rules will fix it.

You can also download qpdf-external-libs-src.zip and follow the
instructions in the README.txt there for how to build external libs.


Building from version control
=============================

If you check out qpdf from version control, you will not have the
files that are generated by autoconf.  If you are not changing these
files, you can grab them from a source distribution or create them
from a system that has autoconf.  To create them from scratch, run
./autogen.sh on a system that has autoconf installed.  Once you have
them, you can run make CLEAN=1 autofiles.zip.  This will create an
autofiles.zip that you can extract on top of a fresh checkout.


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

QPDF is known to build and pass its test suite with mingw (latest
version tested: gcc 4.6.2), mingw64 (latest version tested: 4.7.0) and
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.  MSYS plus
ActiveState Perl is required to build as well in order to get make
and other related tools.  While it is possible that Cygwin could be
used to build native Windows versions of qpdf, this configuration has
not been tested recently.

From your MSYS prompt, run

  ./config-mingw32

or

  ./config-mingw64

and then

  make

Note that ./config-mingw32 and ./configure-mingw64 just run
./configure with specific arguments, so you can look at it, make
adjustments, and manually run configure instead.  Note also that
config-mingw32 appends definition of _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to
qpdf-config.h since, as of the qpdf 3.0 release, the current versions
of the autoconf tools did not correctly detect that mingw requires
this to get large file support.  This workaround is only required for
mingw32.  The 64-bit version of mingw works "out of the box" with
large file support, as do both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of MSVC.

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.

To create an installation directory, run make install.  This will
create install-mingw/qpdf-VERSION and populate it.  The binary
download of qpdf for Windows with mingw is created from this
directory.

You can also take a look at make_windows_releases for reference.  This
is how the distributed Windows executables are created.


Building with MSVC 2010
=======================

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 Visual C++ 2010.  Earlier version of qpdf
were built with MSVC 2008 Express.

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.  Make sure that you start a command line environment
configured for whichever of 32-bit or 64-bit output that you intend to
build for.

From that cmd prompt, you can start your msys shell by just running
manually whatever command is associated with your msys shell icon.

Configure as follows:

  ./config-msvc 32

or

  ./config-msvc 64

Note that you must pass the 32/64 option that matches your command
line setup.  The scripts do not presently figure this out.  If you
used the wrong argument, it would probably just build the size you
have in your environment and then install the results in the wrong
place.

Once configured, run

  make

Note that ./config-msvc just runs ./configure with specific arguments,
so you can look at it, make adjustments, and manually run configure
instead.

NOTE: automated dependencies are not generated with the msvc build.
If you're planning on making modifications, you should probably work
with mingw.  If there is a need, I can add dependency information to
the msvc build, but since I only use it for generating release
versions, I haven't bothered.

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.  If you want to link
against debugging libraries, you will have to change /MD to /MDd in
make/msvc.mk.  Note that you must redistribute the Microsoft runtime
DLLs.  Linking with static runtime (/MT) 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.  When you run make install, the
installation process will automatically detect the DLLs and copy them
into the installation bin directory.  Look at the copy_dlls script for
details on how this is accomplished.

Redistribution of the runtime DLL is unavoidable as of this writing;
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.  This has not been retested with the
toolchain versions used to create qpdf 3.0 distributions.