BUILDING SCRIBUS ON MICROSOFT WINDOWS WITH MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO ================================================================== This documentation is minimal and assume you have a decent knowledge of Microsoft Visual Studio. No help regarding use of Visual Studio and related tools will be provided. You will need: - Microsoft Vista, 7 or a more recent version - Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or later (for 32/64bit build) - A recent Qt release built with corresponding Visual Studio version (minimum 5.11, recommended >= 5.12.0) - Scribus common libraries kit downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-libs/ - Scribus 15x libraries kit downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-libs/ Provided solutions have been tested with following Microsoft Visual Studion editions: - Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Express and Professional - Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Express, Community and Professional - Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community and Professional GETTING DEPENDENCIES ==================== This is a quick and dirty set of notes that will be filled out once everything's verified as correct and working. It assumes that you'll be building all your dependencies at a single root such as C:\Developer. The root *MUST NOT* have spaces in its path. Building Qt: ------------ Due to the complexity involved in compiling Qt, it is suggested to download precompiled binaries. To do so, get Qt Online installer at https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer, execute installer and follow instructions. If you want to compile Qt yourself, you will find some basic instructions below. Download the latest Qt 5 release from https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/ and unpack it to C:\Developer. Follow instructions in following pages to get Qt build dependencies, noticeably perl, python and ruby: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/windows-requirements.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/windows-building.html Start a command line and import your Visual Studio environment: - for building 32bit on Visual Studio 2015: \path\to\visual\studio\VC\vcvarsall.bat x86 - for building 64bit on Visual Studio 2015: \path\to\visual\studio\VC\vcvarsall.bat x86_amd64 - for building 32bit on Visual Studio 2017 or 2019: \path\to\visual\studio\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat x86 - for building 64bit on Visual Studio 2017 or 2019: \path\to\visual\studio\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat x86_amd64 Now cd to C:\Developer\qt-everywhere-whatever and run configure: configure -platform win32-msvc -prefix /path/where/you/want/qt5/to/be/installed -nomake examples -nomake tests -opengl dynamic -opensource -mp After configure has finished its work, run nmake. Depending on the number of processors available on your machine, a complete Qt build may take from a few hours to several days. Once Qt has finished building, run following command to install Qt to its install directory: nmake install If you want to build Qt docs, you might want to run following command afterwards: nmake docs nmake install_docs Once you finished building and installing Qt, you can run following command to clean Qt source directory: nmake distclean Building 3rd party libraries: ----------------------------- Archives with ready-to-build solutions for scribus dependencies have been made available on Sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-libs/ Archives for Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017 are provided. These archives can be used to compile all dependencies necessary for Scribus. These archives allows to build libraries for 32bit and 64bit platforms using default toolsets. The default configuration allows to build binaries compatible with Windows Vista and up. Two different archives are needed : - scribus-commmon-libs-YYYYMMDD.7z : common libraries for 14x and trunk, no compilation is required here - scribus-15x-libs-msvcXXXX-YYYYMMDD.7z : Scribus 15x specific libraries used for current Scribus 1.5.x releases These archives are named using a scheme where: - msvcXXXX represents the Visual Studio version needed to compile provided Visual Studio solution - YYYYMMDD represents the date where the archive has been prepared/uploaded to Sourceforge. Once you downloaded the two appropriate archives : - decompress them in the *same* directory so as to get a layout similar to this one : - your_scribus_libs_directory |- scribus-1.5.x-libs-msvc2015 |- scribus-common-libs - open the visual studio solution (*.sln) located in the scribus-1.5.x-libs-* directory - build debug and release configurations for all platforms (Win32 and/or x64) you plan to execute scribus on If you want to build using a different toolset, you can use msbuild through the command line. To do so you can use the provided build-all-platform-libs.bat script. For example : - to build with Visual Studio 2015 default toolset for x64 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat x64 v140 - to build with Visual Studio 2015 default toolset for Win32 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat Win32 v140 - to build with Visual Studio 2017 default toolset for x64 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat x64 v141 - to build with Visual Studio 2017 default toolset for Win32 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat Win32 v141 - to build with Visual Studio 2019 default toolset for x64 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat x64 v142 - to build with Visual Studio 2019 default toolset for Win32 platform: build-all-platform-libs.bat Win32 v142 BUILDING SCRIBUS ==================== After having compiled all dependencies, open the Scribus-build-props.props file located in Scribus\win32\msvc2015, Scribus\win32\msvc2017 or Scribus\win32\msvc2019 depending on the Visual Studio version you are using in a text editor. Update the dependency paths to match your system. Open the Visual Studio solution located in same directoy and start building. Note: if you built dependencies with a different toolset than the default one, you should either modify toolset directly in all projects or build the solution through command line using msbuild. After building completed, you will find executables in a Scribus-builds\scribus-$(configuration)-$(platform)-$(platformtoolset)\ directory, located in same directory as Scribus sources. Those executables will not function yet. Scribus dependencies must be copied to install directory first. INSTALLING RESOURCES AND DEPENDENCIES ===================================== The provided Visual Studio solutions are configured in such a way that resources provided by Scribus source code will be copied to appropriate directories during the build process. Before being able to run Scribus, you will have however to copy dependency dlls to build directories. To install common libs: - open the scribus-common-libs directory where you uncompressed common libraries - open the copy-dlls-to-15x-build-dir.bat file from scribus-common-libs directory in a text editor - modify the SCRIBUS_BUILDS_DIR, SCRIBUS_LIB_TOOLSET variables appropriately - execute batch file To install version specific libs: - open the scribus-15x-libs-msvc* directory where you uncompressed Scribus 15x libs - open the copy-dlls-to-build-dir file in a text editor - modify the SCRIBUS_BUILDS_DIR and SCRIBUS_LIB_TOOLSET variables appropriately - execute batch file Finally copy Qt DLLs to build directory and Qt plugins directory to "qtplugins" directory. Scribus should now run. Crash problems at runtime? Verify that Scribus and all its dependencies use the same runtime, and that all were built for debug or release configurations and not a mixture of the two. On Windows, it is strictly not recommended to mix debug and release binaries. Doing so is not supported and will usually trigger unpredictable issues and crashes. You can use depends.exe to check that the runtimes match.