Re: including fontconfig utilities to windows binary packages

[Tatsuro M. <tma...@ya...>]

----- Original Message -----

> From: Allin Cottrell
> To: Tatsuro MATSUOKA 
> Cc: Merritt Ethan ; gnuplot-beta ; bmaerkisch
> Date: 2018/5/3, Thu 11:45
> Subject: Re: including fontconfig utilities to windows binary packages
> 
> 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
>

Thank for your explanations. 
I have misled about pango/cairo/glib.

But as a window version gnuplot builder, I cannot drop gd terminals with fontconfig/freetype because we have to provide full featured gnuplot as possible.

In addition, the easiest way to set-up build environments on native windows to install Msys2 with MinGW w64. The way of build on native windows is documented by Bastian.
  Build instructions using MSYS2/Mingw-w64
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/support-requests/199/

In that build system pango/cairo/glib libraries are prepared with linking fontconfig/freetype and
I do not think that there is no reason not to use fontconfig/freetype in the system.

Tatsuro