Dear Christian,
Thanks for these valuable links. Actually one of the first things I did was to
download the referred zip package. Unfortunately, it does not contain
liblouis.lib, at least not in a form I could recognize. Liblouis.lib is
required by the nmake script that builds liblouisutdml.dll.
This is why I turned my hand to build liblouis.dll myself.
As a next step, I attempted to build liblouisutdml.dll for Windows, and I
encountered some issues.
I found the file "readme.windows" in the liblouisutdml folder, and actually
this was the only set of instructions I could find.
This file seems to differ from the current state of things at several points.
The recommended method for getting a command prompt set up for building the
desired dll-s did not work for me but I could get around this problem.
However, the following passage caused me surprises:
'The "For Developers" page of http://www.brailleblaster.org contains links ;
for liblouis, liblouisutdml, the recommended version of libxml2 and the
swt.jar files for various platforms and architectures.'
I immediately visited www.brailleblaster.org but I was unable to find the
referred "For Developers" page. This was a big blow. I tried to figure out what
versions of which required components must be obtained. The first thing was
liblouis.dll and liblouis.lib. These were produced as I managed to conclude the
build procedure.
I've got JDK 1.7 installed, luckily it sufficed.
Then I got stuck for a while at the libxml2 dependency. First I obtained its
2.9.4 version but the liblouisutdml building log got filled with very
suspicious syntax errors.
Since the readme.windows file mentioned libxml2 version 2.7.2, I went back to
find and download it from an archive following this link:
http://xmlsoft.org/sources/?C=D;O=A
I was a bit puzzled to realize that this version was released in 2008. I wonder
whether this may hold some unwishful future implications.
However, this version has satisfied the liblouisutdml building nmake script:
the errors and the fatal error were gone but a few dozens of warnings appeared
(most of them complaining about macro redefinitions).
Would it make any sense to list these warnings for You?
Should I be concerned about them?
Readme.windows states that after successfully building liblouis, the files
liblouis-2.dll and liblouis-2.lib will appear in the liblouis\windows folder.
Actually, liblouis.dll and liblouis.lib are created there, without the -2
suffix. Fortunately, these are the filenames expected by the liblouisutdml
build script.
Thus the build process runs through successfully, the files (liblouisutdml.dll,
liblouisutdml.lib, etc.) are created as expected.
Do anyone have a clue how to compile file2brl.exe in Windows?
I've found its c source and a Makefile.am in the tools folder but I don't know
what command to run with what parameters to get the file2brl.c source compiled
into an exe file.
I have seen a discussion on Github about this topic dating back to June-July
2016. The tone there was a bit discouraging. Is there any advancement since
then?
Thanks a lot again for Your help.
Best Regards, Norbert.
From: Christian Egli
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2017 9:17 PM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: SV: Re: Build questions
Hi Markus
On 03/14/2017 06:41 PM, Norbert Markus wrote:
Hi Anders,
The reason is that actually I'll need to use liblouisutdml.dll. I was unable
to find a pre-built dll version for Windows. If You are aware of any site from
which a recent liblouisutdml.dll can be downloaded, this would save me from
building it manually.
But if this is a necessary step, it seems, liblouis.lib is required for
building liblouisutdml.dll, and I could not find liblouis.lib for download.
Thus I had to build it manually to obtain the lib file.
The windows build of liblouis, (liblouis-3.1.0-mingw32msvc.zip, available at
http://liblouis.org/downloads/ and also ;
https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/releases/tag/v3.1.0) should contain
liblouis.dll, liblouis.def and all the header files. This was built using mingw
and should be updated with every release.
Hope that helps
Christian
