Re: [ft-devel] buiding ttfautohint with cmake?

[Cosimo Lupo]

Hi Martin,

early on you wrote

> it shouldn't be too complicated to build a DLL of ttfautohint that statically links all dependencies, e.g. using dlltool.

could you please elaborate a bit?

Here is my attempt at building a shared library or DLL for libttfautohint that has freetype and harfbuzz dependencies statically linked and has no other requirements than system libraries:

https://github.com/fonttools/ttfautohint-python/blob/master/Makefile

I basically reworked a shell script originally written by Werner that builds a self-contained statically linked ttfautohint executable, turned it into a Makefile, and I applied Martin's patch that enables libttfautohint.so shared library on top of ttfautohint master.

I have the three repositories of ttfautohint, freetype2 and harfbuzz checked in as git submodules.

This seems to work well for Linux and Mac (i.e. ldd, or the mac equivalent otool -L, does not list harfbuzz or freetype as dependencies, which is what I want).

However on Windows under MINGW64 environment the final linking step fails with an error and I get this warning from libtool

*** Warning: This system cannot link to static lib archive .../libharfbuzz.la.

*** I have the capability to make that library automatically link in when

*** you link to this library.  But I can only do this if you have a

*** shared version of the library, which you do not appear to have.

Exactly the same message for the libfreetype.la file.

Can anybody help?

Thank you in advance

Cosimo

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 1:07 PM Cosimo Lupo <address@hidden> wrote:

Thanks Martin! It works well :)

Werner, would it be possible to merge this patch upstream, so that I can use it without having to apply this downstream?

I think it would be useful for others as well to be able to build a shared library for ttfautohint.

Thanks

Cosimo

On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 7:55 AM Martin Gieseking <address@hidden> wrote:

Am 08.12.2017 um 02:27 schrieb Cosimo Lupo:
> P.S. It’s Cosimo btw ;)

Oops, just noticed the typo. Sorry for that. It wasn't intentional.

Let me know if you have any issues with the the build modifications.

Martin




>
> Il 7 dic 2017, 22:18 +0000, Martin Gieseking <address@hidden>,
> ha scritto:
>> Hello Cosmimo,
>>
>> I'm also interested in a shared library of ttfautohint and played around
>> with the build system. The attached patch modifies the autotool scripts
>> so that public static and shared libraries are built and installed.
>> When using MSYS2/MinGW64 on Windows, I get a working DLL. It doesn't
>> contain harfbuzz and freetype, though. They must be linked separately to
>> the target applications. However, it shouldn't be too complicated to
>> build a DLL of ttfautohint that statically links all dependencies, e.g.
>> using dlltool.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> Am 07.12.2017 um 16:51 schrieb Cosimo Lupo:
>>> Thanks Werner,
>>>
>>> I looked at the gnulib docs but honestly it looks a bit complicated..
>>> I think that, for the beginning, I will compile the Windows DLL with
>>> the mingw-w64 toolchain in an msys2 environment.
>>> I think that should work fine, even from the official MSVC-compiled
>>> cpython distribution, because I'm not planning to make a python
>>> extension module (i.e. shared object that calls into the Python C API
>>> and requires to link with the python library, thus needs to be compiled
>>> with the same compiler as python itself), but just a shared library
>>> independent from python that is dynamically loaded at runtime via dlopen
>>> or LoadLibrary by ctypes or cffi.
>>> This way I can use the normal autotools build system on all three
>>> operating systems.
>>>
>>> I just need to figure out how to create a shared libttfautohint.so, as
>>> the current setup normally only creates a static library embedded in the
>>> ttfautohint executable.
>>>
>>> If you have any tips, please let me know, thank you!
>>>
>>> Cosimo
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 2:05 PM Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden
>>> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello Cosmimo,
>>>
>>>
>>>> I would like to make a Python wrapper for ttfautohint, [...]  I want
>>>> to build a shared library (.so, .dll, .dylib) and call that from
>>>> Python using either ctypes or better CFFI.  [...]
>>>
>>> OK.
>>>
>>>> Now, freetype and harfbuzz both support cmake as an alternative to
>>>> ./configure && make stuff. That's great.
>>>
>>> Note, however, that FreeType's cmake stuff is contributed code.  Since
>>> I dislike cmake I haven't enough experience to handle potential issues
>>> by myself.
>>>
>>>> From a cursory look at the ttfautohint source, I see that it depends
>>>> on gnulib, which looks like it's closely tied with the autotools...
>>>> I couldn't find any cmake projects using gnulib on the net.
>>>
>>> This is probably correct.  Maybe a cmake e-mail list or forum can give
>>> you more advice.
>>>
>>>> For those of you who are more knowledgeable about this, how
>>>> difficult would it be to adapt the current autotools-based build
>>>> system of ttfautohint to use cmake, for example?
>>>
>>> In file `bootstrap.conf' you can find the list of gnulib modules that
>>> ttfautohint requires:
>>>
>>>   dirname
>>>   fcntl-h
>>>   getopt-gnu
>>>   git-version-gen       (only necessary for the ttfautohint binary)
>>>   isatty                (ditto)
>>>   memmem-simple
>>>   progname              (ditto)
>>>   stdarg
>>>   stdbool
>>>   stdint
>>>   std-gnu11
>>>   strerror_r-posix
>>>   strndup
>>>   strtok_r
>>>   strtoull
>>>   vasprintf
>>>
>>> Please consult the gnulib git repository for more information on the
>>> used modules.
>>>
>>> The idea of gnulib is that it only provides replacement code if the
>>> host's functionality is either missing, incomplete, or buggy.  These
>>> tests are implemented as M4, to be automatically integrated into
>>> automake and/or autoconf.
>>>
>>> It's probably easiest if you find, say, BSD replacement code for the
>>> above functionality; cmake then could simply compile and link to it if
>>> it is missing.
>>>
>>>
>>>     Werner
>>>
>>> --
>>> Cosimo Lupo
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Freetype-devel mailing list
>>> address@hidden
>>> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
>>>
>>

--

Cosimo Lupo

--

Cosimo Lupo