Poppler

E-Sheet launch

This weekend (15-16 September) the ice hockey competitions of the Royal Belgian Ice hockey Federation (RBIHF) start, this is an important moment for the E-Sheet project.

For those who don't know it yet I created the E-Sheet application for the RBIHF. The main purpose of the application is to make the administration of the games easier and faster. The biggest improvement is that the game sheets don't have to be written down and reentered afterwards on the RBIHF website, by using the E-Sheet the data is only entered once and synchronized with the RBIHF servers. Another positive note is that there is less change of cheating; e.g. adding players after the game has started.

In addition to the program I also build a website. The website runs on Drupal 7 and is multilingual there are three languages available; English, Dutch and French. The website consists out of several useful features for the users of the E-Sheet; e.g. Help pages, download page, known issues. For more information on the website check it out or take a look at it's project page.

Building Poppler on Windows using MinGW

The E-Sheet project needed to be able to create and view PDF's. After looking around, I noticed a lot of people proposed to use Poppler, but to use it I needed to build the libraries. Since there isn't much information out there, I could only base my tries on this tutorial.

Downloads

  • Poppler (I used poppler-0.18.4)
  • Qt4 or the sources if you want to compile Qt as well. I tried them both and both were successful, so it's up to you.
  • MinGW download the installer (e.g. mingw-get-inst-20111118.exe)
  • CMake
  • Freetype
  • Cairo
    While building I encountered the following error:
    C:/.../CairoOutputDev.h:38:22: fatal error: cairo-ft.h: No such file or directory
    To solve this I moved the files located in the /include/cairo folder to the /include folder.
    Then another error occurred:
    C:/.../include/cairo-ft.h:50:35: fatal error: fontconfig/fontconfig.h: No such file or directory
    To solve this you will need to download Fontconfig. Once the download is complete copy the /include/fontconfig folder from the fontconfig archive into the cairo /include folder. The other parts of the fontconfig archive are not needed.
  • Openjpeg
  • Zlib