Install pdf-tools on windows with msys2

setup-pdf-tools-msys2.org

Notes for compiling and setting up pdf-tools using msys2

Steps

1. Open msys2 shell
2. Get pdf-tools

   git clone https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools
   cd pdf-tools
       

3. Update and install dependencies, skipping any you already have

   pacman -Syu
   pacman -S base-devel
   pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
   pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib
   pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng
   pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-poppler
   pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-imagemagick
       

4. Open mingw64 shell
5. Compile pdf-tools

   make -s
       

6. Open emacs
7. Install

   M-x package-install-file RET pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar RET
       

8. Activate package

   M-x pdf-tools-install RET
       

9. Test

   M-x pdf-info-check-epdfinfo RET
       

Problems

1. Step 8 failed for me and it took me a while to figure out why. There were two problems to be fixed
   1. epdfinfo.exe was loading a library from git-for-windows and there was an error from this. To fix this I made sure the mingw libraries were ahead of the git-for-windows ones in my path like this

      (setenv "PATH" (concat "C:\\msys64\\mingw64\\bin;" (getenv "PATH")))
              

   2. The default encoding for newly created files was utf-8-dos, which uses line endings that epdfinfo doesn’t like. I originally had

      (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
              

      but needed

      (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
              

Some additional steps I had to do, to get the compilation to work:

# For cask: Install python2 in mingw, because global python.exe was python3
pacman -S python

# Make the mingw-shell aware of my python installation.
export PATH="/c/Program Files/Emacs/bin/:$PATH"

# Install cask. Certificate errors can be ignored with (unsafe) -k option.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cask/cask/master/go | python
export PATH="$HOME/.cask/bin:$PATH"