[Devel] Re: Mac OSX Build Problems

[David Turner]

Hello Henry,

Henry Maddocks wrote:
> Sorry to contact you directly but I have a problem with Freetype that 
> just doesn't seem to be getting any attention.
> I have written a font rendering library for openGL that uses Freetype 2...
>
> http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~henryj/code/index.html#FTGL
>
> I wrote the library mainly to solve a problem at work (I write graphics 
> software for television stations) and since I have released it, it has  
> proven reasonably popular and has a lot of users on many platforms. I 
> develop FTGL on Mac OSX.
> Since version 2.0.9 Freetype hasn't compiled correctly on OSX when using 
> the standard build tools. (configure; make) The function FT_New_Face 
> isn't being compiled and exported by the library. I have posted messages 
> on the freetype list after every release since then reporting the 
> problem but still it persists.
>
> The problem is the result of two things. In base/ftobjs.c there is a 
> #ifndef FT_MACINTOSH around FT_New_face that prevents the standard 
> function from being compiled and the file base/ftmac.c isn't being 
> compiled to replace it. It is as simple as that.

I believe that the FT_MACINTOSH macro is used to indicate that FreeType
is built for a "classic" MacOS environment, not MacOS X which should be
treated as a normal Unix. It seems that this macro is defined in
"include/freetype/config/ftconfig.h" by the following lines:

  #if defined( __APPLE__ ) || ( defined( __MWERKS__ ) && defined( macintosh ) )
  #define FT_MACINTOSH 1
  #endif

I know that there have been discussion on the mailing list regarding the
fact that "__APPLE__" when building on MacOS X and that it should be
removed from this test to make things work normally. However, I'm not
a Mac guy, and didn't want to enter this debate since I'm pretty certain
that Mac compilers work in their own tricky ways when it comes to
defining "system" macros like these ones.

Maybe Leonard Rosenthol, which was in charge of the "ftmac.c" portion of
the library last time I looked at it could make an authoritative answer
on the subject and decide about this change. I have sent a copy of this
answer to the development mailing list for information purpose. I hope
Leonard or someone else will be able to answer this tricky topic.

Note that the FT_MACINTOSH macro is not used in other parts of the
library, not even by "src/base/ftmac.c"

> Unfortunately I don't know enough about autoconf to fix this myself and 
> as it is the only way to build Freetype with the standard development 
> tools it is reducing the attractiveness of both Freetype and ftgl for 
> mac users. I do plan to convert Freetype to use Project Builder but I 
> haven't the time at the moment.
I don't think it's an autoconf problem. Fortunately :o)
Best Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)

> This becoming extremely frustrating. I hope that you can ensure that 
> some action takes place on this issue.
>
> TIA
>
> Henry Maddocks


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