Re: Installing Pango with the Xft backend

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel oden homeip net>]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 01:01:12PM +0530, Viraj Chatterjee wrote:
> Though Karina's problem got solved 'cos she didn't need to install the 
> latest GTK+ package, but this confusion about Xft and Xft2 and which one is 
> required and where to get a good installation of GTK+ 2.6 is really a pain 
> at times.

If I'm wring here, please correct me but I understand that Xft2 is
simply version 2.0 of Xft. See:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Xft

for more details.

> I've failed to get an installation of GTK+ correctly on debian 'cos of the 
> same reason.

On debian testing you shouldn't have to worry about this, since GTK+
is already version 2.6

If you still need to build you own version of GTK+, Xft version 2.0 is
for debian testing packaged in the package libxft-dev. Not sure if you
need libpango1.0-dev installed as well. BTW, for debian there is a
very handy program called apt-file (not installed by default, you need
to 'apt-get install apt-file'). This will return which package to
install to get a certain file, so if I knew that I was missing a
library for example and I knew a filename that is part of that library
(let's say xft.pc) I just do a apt-file search xft.pc which will
return libxft-dev. Read the manpage first though, apt-file needs to
be setup so that it has a current index locally of what's available.

> Everything installs succesfully, till I get to GTK+ which exits with the 
> "configure: error: Pango Xft backend required for x11 target". And, I have 
> Xft and freetype installed on the system.

I just verified that GTK+ 2.6.4 configures just fine on my debian
testing machine. There shouldn't be any magic required here.

-- 
Daniel Nilsson