Nerijus Baliunas schreef op wo 13-07-2011 om 23:45 [+0300]:
Why freetype support is disabled in mingw32-cairo? I recompiled it with the following patch and then was able to build poppler:
Freetype is disabled in cairo to avoid dependency bloat. If we enable it, then it will cause all gtk2/gtk3 applications to start depending on freetype and fontconfig (as the freetype + fontconfig dependencies will then be added to the cairo dll). This seems like an useless dependency to me as the entire gtk stack contains native implementations for the stuff that freetype and fontconfig provide, so that makes the use of freetype and fontconfig obsolete.
Up until now there hasn't been any application or library known to us which really depends on freetype support in cairo. I personally only see freetype and fontconfig as a temporary method to get applications and libraries working on win32 until there's native win32 support for font related stuff. Because of that I don't see a good reason to include freetype support in cairo.
I just did a checkout of the poppler code to see how dependent poppler really is on cairo-ft and I only found two calls to a cairo-ft specific function. The file poppler/CairoFontEngine.cc contains two calls to the cairo-ft function cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face. Perhaps you could ask upstream to implement a method to make these 2 calls optional (so that poppler still remains to work even if cairo-ft is missing) ?
Kind regards,
Erik van Pienbroek