I wanted to try out the latest version of lamdu, a “live programming” environment (still in early development). It uses graphics-drawingcombinators which in turn depends on FTGL to accomplish its text-drawing-in-OpenGL magic. On linux this isn’t really an issue – a simple ‘cabal install’ does it, at least on the version of ubuntu that I use (EDIT: You’ll probably first need to install the ftgl dev files, e.g. sudo apt-get -y install libftgl-dev
)
Windows? No problem! With a few hacks, you’ll be rendering text in no time. This worked on my 64-bit Windows 8 installation but should work on any version since Windows XP.
- I’m assuming you have the latest Haskell Platform for Windows installed. If not, do it!
- Get 32-bit windows binaries for FreeType and FTGL. I downloaded them from: http://www.opencascade.org/getocc/download/3rdparty/, but you might as well compile them from the official sources.
- Copy the FTGL.dll and FreeType.dll to:
- 64-bit version of Windows: copy to c:\windows\syswow64
- 32-bit version of Windows: copy to c:\windows\system32
- Install the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable, 32-bit version
- Assuming you’ve unpackged the FTGL binaries in some directory “<blabla>\ftgl-2.1.3-vc10-32”, run the following:
cabal install ftgl --extra-include-dirs=<blabla>\ftgl-2.1.3-vc10-32\include --extra-lib-dirs=<blabla>\ftgl-2.1.3-vc10-32\lib --reinstall --force-reinstalls
- cabal build / install whatever executable you wanted to (in my case, lamdu)
That’s it! Hope I saved someone the near-hour I spent figuring this out.
Exactly what I needed!
Just installed the 64bit haskell platform, and grabbed the 64bit version of ftgl, and made sure all the directories are spelled correct, but it refuses to pick up this library…Any insite would be greatly appreciated.
http://pastebin.com/TRyfgHd4
A lot has changed since this post was written, nowadays many people recommend using MinGHC + stack to setup a Haskell environment on Windows, see here https://github.com/fpco/minghc