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 Windows 10 build 1809 or a more recent version
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 or later (for 32/64bit build)
- A recent Qt release built with corresponding Visual Studio version (minimum 6.2, recommended >= 6.2.3)
- Scribus 17x 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 2019 Community and Professional
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 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.


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 2019 and 2022 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.

Download the scribus-17x-libs-msvc-YYYYMMDD.7z archive where YYYYMMDD represents the date when the archive has been prepared/uploaded to Sourceforge.
This archive contains Scribus 1.7.x specific libraries used for current Scribus 1.7.x releases.

Then follow these steps :
- uncompress the downloaded archive in the directory of your choice. The path of this directory should be as short as possible as
  Visual Studio compiler and linker cannot handle paths of more than about 250 characters
- open the visual studio solution (*.sln) located in the scribus-1.7.x-libs-* directory
- build debug and release configurations for all platforms (Win32 and/or x64) you plan to execute scribus on

You can also use msbuild through the command line. To do so you can use the provided build-libs.bat script. 
Execute the script and a menu will allow you to choose amongst the different supported Microsoft Visual Studio
versions and platforms.

BUILDING SCRIBUS
====================

After having compiled all dependencies, open the Scribus-build-props.props file located in Scribus\win32\msvc2019,
or Scribus\win32\msvc2022 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 directory 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 Scribus dependency dlls:
- open the scribus-1.7.x-libs-msvc directory where you uncompressed Scribus 1.7.x libs
- open the copy-dlls-to-build-dir.bat file in a text editor
- modify the SCRIBUS_BUILDS_DIR variable 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.
