I'm the author of an application that uses cairo for drawing. I use Freetype fonts, but all the font management is done by the application itself (more precisely, the fonts come from PDF files generated by pdflatex). To build my application for Windows, I need to compile cairo with support for freetype. However, this currently requires me to also build fontconfig and libexpat (used by fontconfig), and to package those with my application. This is complete unnecessary: The Freetype font driver in cairo is perfectly usable and useful without fontconfig (creating fonts using cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face). I'm currently patching Cairo myself, commenting out everything in cairo-ft-font.[hc] that depends on fontconfig, and modifying the makefile to not link with fontconfig. It would be great if this could be a configuration option, as it would probably be useful for others as well.
commit 3ec94f9b5917b8f71304c982bd153e5a810f3b12 Author: Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@behdad.org> Date: Tue Mar 17 00:53:30 2009 -0400 Support compiling without fontconfig Adds a new, fake, fontconfig font backend. Fontconfig can be disabled using --disable-fc, in which case the toy text API wont find fonts and the internal font will always be used. Also defines the feature macro CAIRO_HAS_FC_FONT. The two fontconfig-specif functions in cairo-ft.h depend on that macro now.
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