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Customizing Cairo for non-Linux systems

The approach of building abcCairo for an OS other than Linux seems to run into problems
with the font handling. Specifically, the libfontconfig library seems to expect a Linux-style
filesystem to find fonts, so it is unlikely to work on another OS. Fortunately, it is possible
to build the Cairo library without libfontconfig by following these steps in the Cairo library
directory:

make clean
./configure --enable-fc=no
make

The configure step selects various options for building the source code. After this, the
libfontconfig library does not needed to be linked into the executable. The Cairo library
provides what appears to be a Windows-specific option which looks as if it might do the
job of replacing libfontconfig in a Windows environment e.g.

./configure --enable-fc=no --enable-win32-font=yes

I have not tested this approach.

Posted by James Allwright 2021-07-17

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