Building Cairo on Windows

=========================

There are two primary ways to build Cairo on Windows. You can use a

UNIX emulation based setup, such as Cygwin or MSYS, with the

conventional configure script shipped with Cairo releases. In this

configuration, you will build with GCC and (implicitly) libtool. In

the Cygwin case you end up with a DLL that depends on Cygwin and

should be used only from Cygwin applications. In the MSYS case you end

up with a "normal" Win32 DLL that can be used either from GCC- or

Microsoft Visual C++-compiled code. In theory, this technique is no

different than the ordinary build process for the Cairo library. In

practise there are lots of small details that can go wrong.

The second way is to use a GNU-compatible make, but build using

Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler to produce native libraries.  This is

the setup this README.win32 is written for. Also the DLL produced this

way is usable either from GCC- or MSVC-compiled code.

Tools required

==============

You will need GNU make, version 3.80 or later.  Earlier versions or

other modern make implementations may work, but are not guaranteed to.

You will also need Microsoft Visual C++.  Version 7 has been most

heavily tested, but other versions are likely to work fine.

Libraries required

==================

Cairo requires a compatible version of the pixman library.  Full build

instructions are beyond the scope of this document; however, using the

same tools, it should be possible to build pixman simply by entering

the pixman/src directory and typing:

    make -f Makefile.win32 CFG=release

Depending on your feature set, you may also need zlib and libpng.

Building

========

There are a few files that you will need to edit.  First, you must

determine which features will be built.  Edit

build/Makefile.win32.features and set the features as desired.  Note

that most features have external dependencies; specifically,

CAIRO_HAS_PNG_FUNCTIONS requires libpng to be present, and

CAIRO_HAS_PS_SURFACE and CAIRO_HAS_PDF_SURFACE both require zlib.

To ensure that the compiler can find all dependencies, you may need to

edit build/Makefile.win32.common.  In particular, ensure that

PIXMAN_CFLAGS contains a -I parameter pointing to the location of

your pixman header files and that PIXMAN_LIBS points to the actual

location of your pixman-1.lib file.  You may also need to edit the

various occurrences of CAIRO_LIBS to point to other libraries

correctly.  Note also that if you wish to link statically with zlib,

you should replace zdll.lib with zlib.lib.

Finally, from the top Cairo directory, type:

    make -f Makefile.win32 CFG=release

If this command succeeds, you will end up with src/release/cairo.dll.

To successfully use Cairo from your own programs, you will probably

want to move this file to some central location.  You will also

probably want to copy the Cairo header files.  These should be placed

in a cairo subdirectory (for instance, c:/code/common/include/cairo).

The exact set to copy depends on your features and is reported to you

at the end of the build.