Windows and GTK
lazarus / 13-General

----------------------------------------------------------------------
jbreits · 2007-02-05 16:39

I've been a Windows/Delphi guy for around 9 years now.  More and more,
I am liking the open source movement and am trying to embrace it as
much as possible.  From what I've tried so far, I absolutely love FPC
and Lazarus.  Especially the ability to cross-compile.

My question, however, is related to the GTK or GTK2 toolkit.  I
realize that I can compile for Windows using the Win32 toolkit and for
Linux using GTK.  However, I was wondering if I could successfully
compile for Windows using GTK.  There seems to be some advantages of
using GTK over the Win32 widgets.  For one, I would suspect that my
GUI would look the same on Linux and Windows.  Secondly, it is my
understanding that GTK includes support for SVG (via Cairo).  I would
love to be able to take advantage of SVG in my applications.

Seems like this would be possible as there is a version of GIMP that
uses GTK that runs on windows.  I downloaded and isntalled the GTK2
win 32 runtime.  I re-built the LCL for GTK2 and then compiled a test
app for GTK2 (compiling for GTK didn't work), but when I ran it, my
form was basically just a picture of the desktop where the form was
originally positioned (like the form hadn't refreshed).

Has anyone had any luck with this?  Or does anyone know of any open
source svg libraries that could be used through Lazarus?

Thanks,
JBreits

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Marc · 2007-02-05 17:49

As you found out, you need indeed GTK2 when running on windows.
However this is work in progress. In 2 ways. First the gtk2 interface
isn't complete. There are still parts missing, but might be usefull
for your app. Second, since last week all hardcoded X dependencies
were removed for the gtk2 widgetset. They are now ifdeffed, but the
specific implementatien for win32 and osx is in most cases still
missing.
Currently the win32/gtk1 interface are most used on windows/linux.

For SVG support, there are plans to add a TSVGGraphic native, but that
is still futureware.