Libwmf 0.1.17 review

Libwmf is a library to enable non windows systems to work with wmf files, currently bindings exist to convert wmf files to gif & fig

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 714K Developer: Martin Vermeer

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Libwmf is a library to enable non windows systems to work with wmf files, currently bindings exist to convert wmf files to gif & fig and an X one to draw them in an X window or pixmap.

xwmf draws wmf files on screen (X) use + to zoom in and use - to zoom out wmftopng converts wmf files to png, can use (and i recommend) truetype fonts wmftofig converts wmf files to fig, (new program, needs some work, but very cool)

To install, it should just be a simple matter of

./configure
make
make install


on some machines you might have to have gnu make installed, if the make fails try gmake instead.

For full functionality you have to have X, freetype and the xpm libraries installed.

If the xpm libraries are not in the standard locations you can use ./configure --with-xpm-dir to point to the xpm dir location e.g.

If the freetype libraries are not in the standard locations you can use ./configure --with-ttf-dir to point to the freetype dir location e.g.

In each case the dir can either be the dir above the include and lib dirs where the component can be found. Or the actual dir where both the lib and include files exist.

Requirements:
1) First you must have the xpm libraries installed, this is the default for linux distributions and many others, if you don't have such a system you can get xpm from ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/libraries

2) To compile this code in its entirity you should have the freetype library (http://www.freetype.org), and you should have a range of truetype fonts, typically the ones supplied with windows.

freetype is only required for the gd binding to libwmf, i.e. the wmftopng program, the X bindings, (xwmf) doesn't require the truetype library, but i very much reccomend that you install xfsft, or have a X server able to use ttf fonts.

Without the freetype library wmftopng will compile, but will not be able to display text strings in the output png. If you do have freetype, you still are required to specify the directory that they are in to wmftopng as the third argument to it, the fonts should be the standard ttf fonts supplied with windows, or the font that the text will be rendered in will not be the original font.

3) Without a truetype font server and the standard windows fonts then the X binding might render text is a different font than would appear under windows natively, this is a runtime issue for the xwmf program.

4) In this release libwmf cannot resize bitmaps embedded in wmf files on its own, and attempt to offload them to the netpbm utilities, so you should have these installed, it wont break anything not to have them installed, and this requirement will be removed in a later release.