Building Scribus on Windows

This page is a work in progress, so be patient until enough information is accumulated to allow you to proceed -- if you feel like going down this difficult path.

There is a good chance you don't want to do this, given its complexity. Since this nonetheless is a recurring question, this page will attempt to give some guidance and explanation of the process.

Requirements
On a personal level:
 * Perseverance
 * A high tolerance of failure -- your initial attempts a compiling are almost certain to fail, so you will need to gradually figure out whether there are missing pieces or what needs to be modified in the source for the Windows environment.

Aside from the Scribus source, there are components that you will need on your Windows system in order to begin to tackle this project.
 * A compiler
 * GDI+ support

from the Scribus Archives (Jean Ghali):

Personally I use Visual C++ Express Edition for compiling 1.3.5svn and have no experience with MingW and Msys. However, here are some elements of an answer. On Windows, Scribus uses GDI+ for printing to GDI printers, mainly for transparency support. As far as I know, MinGW has currently no support for GDI+ library, so compiling with GDI+ support is a bit compromised... There is always some code which uses pure GDI calls, but that code is currently unmaintained and honestly I don't know if it still works.

In all cases, the main task would be to adapt the build environment. Since 1.3.5svn, we have dropped autotools support and switched to CMake. On Windows, CMake can produce visual studio solutions as well as MinGW make files. However there are still some linuxisms in our cmake files which prevent to do so. So one should first remove them. If one would do the work, the team would be happy to integrate the result in svn.