[XeTeX] xdvipdfmx broken on Windows Vista?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 23 Apr 2007, at 12:08 pm, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> I tried to test here on the Mac, compiling from the SVN tarball
> <http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xdvipdfmx/TRUNK.tar.gz?view=tar>
> before and after applying to it the patch mentioned in <http://
> tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2007-March/006073.html>.
>
> I attempted to use the sequence:
>
> $ sh configure --with-kpathsea=/usr/local/gwTeX --with-ft2lib=/usr/
> local/lib/libfreetype.a --with-ft2include=/usr/local/include/freetype2
> $ make
> $ sudo make install
>
> where the kpathsea libraries have been installed with gwTeX.
>
> Alas! On an Intel Mac (MacPro, 2 Dual-Core Xeons), configure failed
> with:
>
> checking whether byte ordering is bigendian... no
> checking for char... yes
> checking size of char... configure: error: cannot compute sizeof
> (char), 77
> See `config.log' for more details.

This sounds like something fundamental is broken in the C compilation/ 
linking process; config.log may give a clue.

> And on a PPC Mac (PowerBook G4), configure proceeded but make failed
> with:
>
> powerpc-apple-darwin8-gcc-4.0.1: /usr/local/lib/libpng12.dylib: No
> such file or directory
> make[2]: *** [xdvipdfmx] Error 1
> make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
> make: *** [all] Error 2
>
> Indeed, looking at the ReadMe for i-Installer's installation of
> libpng, I can see:
>
> 2006/04/06:
> • Completely removed the dynamic libraries. I have had one serious
> report about Apple software like Finder and Safari going haywire in
> Mac OS X 10.4.6 when there are standard open source libpng dylibs
> available in /usr/local/lib. The error turned out to be the result of
> the user fiddling with environment.plist, but I decided to remove the
> dylibs anyway.

Hmm, configure should have detected the lack of libpng. It didn't  
stop there, though, because (in principle, at least) you should be  
able to build the driver without PNG support; but apparently this is  
broken. I'm not very surprised, as in practice I never build a "cut- 
down" version like that.

>
> Thus it seems compilation of xdvipdfmx on the Mac is presently
> broken. Or did I miss something obvious?

Well, you could go get libpng. Simply get the standard source  
tarball, and do the "configure; make; sudo make install" routine. Or  
if you don't want libpng.dylib in /usr/local/lib, you could configure  
it with "--enable-static --disable-shared", and link against  
libpng12.a (without necessarily installing it).

JK