Building freetype2 on Windows #devnotes

building-freetype2.md

Purpose

Building the freetype Windows 32 DLL & LIB for the Windows OpenJDK Compiling.

Get the freetype source code

• Download it from https://www.freetype.org/
• Or sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/
• freetype-2.3.5 at least

Updating the Freetype Visual Studio solution settings

The default Windows building VS solution is "/builds/windows/vc2010/freetype.sln" (I built it via Visual Studio 2015).
The default VS solution and source code are created for static library. We need update below 2 items for change it to .DLL:

• The project config and the General tab, change configuration type to "Dynamic Library (.dll)".
  NOTES: Select your configuration to "Release Multithread" + "Windows 32" first.
• The default freetype Windows code is created for static library. We need change the dll export declare macro in the .h file.
  For freetype-2.3.5: The file is "ftconfig.h". Below items need to update:
  • Change FT_EXPORT to #define FT_EXPORT(x) __declspec(dllexport) x
  • Change FT_BASE to #define FT_BASE(x) __declspec(dllexport) x

Building the freetype

• Select the "Release Multithread" + "Windows 32" configuration and build it.
• The default output folder is "/objs/win32/vc2010"

References

• Compiling FreeType to DLL (as opposed to static library)
• Build freetype and harfbuzz as Windows DLLs

thank