Re: including fontconfig utilities to windows binary packages

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Thu, 3 May 2018, Tatsuro MATSUOKA wrote, in response to my 
posting:

>> [I]insofar as we're talking about terminals based on the 
>> pango/cairo/glib stack on Windows, there's no need to involve 
>> fontconfig (or freetype) at all. The pango backends that are 
>> needed are just Cairo and Win32 (the Win32 backend being an 
>> alternative to freetype + fontconfig that taps into native 
>> Windows font management).
>
> gd also requires fontconfig/freetype if one use standard syntax 
> for fonts for current gnuplot.

True. Opinions may differ, but personally I see no need to build the 
gd terminal for gnuplot if the pango/cairo terminals are available.

> If one compiles libraries of pango/cairo/glib in standard way on 
> windows or use libraries supplied by Msys2 + MinGW w64, freetype 
> and fontconfig is linked and gnuplot uses fontconfig/freetype 
> libraries.

A build of pango, on any system, will by default utilize whatever 
backends are available for managing fonts. If you have freetype and 
fontconfig on your system the associated pango backend will be built 
unless you specify otherwise via the configure script. But my point 
is that this backend is redundant on MS Windows, since pango is able 
to utilize native Windows font management. (The same is true on Mac 
OS X.)

There's no harm in enabling freetype and fontconfig for pango on 
Windows (other than bloat), but so far as I can tell there's also no 
advantage.

Allin Cottrell