Building SIL’s Graphite2 on Windows

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A very short post

I’ve been reading about SIL International’s Graphite engine and it looks really interesting. I downloaded the code and ran the CMake-based build process through the CMake graphical interface. It didn’t work. Eventually, I found some instructions to build it from the command line, so here’s the way I did it.

  1. Make sure the cmake.exe is in your Windows PATH.
  2. Download the Graphite source code and unpack into a directory (e.g, called Graphite).
  3. Change directory to the one containing the Graphite source code.
  4. I use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 so you’ll need to adjust the -G parameter (below) to your build environment (cmake --help tells you the ones it supports).
  5. Run the command (all on one line): cmake -G "Visual Studio 9 2008" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DGRAPHITE2_COMPARE_RENDERER:BOOL=OFF

If all goes well you should see something like the following, together with a generated Visual Studio Solution file graphite2.sln.

-- Build: Release
-- Segment Cache support: enabled
-- File Face support: enabled
-- Tracing support: enabled
CMake Warning at CMakeLists.txt:54 (message):
  vm machine type direct can only be built using GCC

-- Using vm machine type: call
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: E:/SILgraide/Graphite

Your Visual Studio Solution should look something like this: