Compiling GNOME Print Applications on UNIX

To compile a GNOME Print application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the GNOME Print header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility.

The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used:

$ pkg-config --cflags libgnomeprint-2.2
-I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/include/libgnomeprint-2.2 -I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/include/libart-2.0 -I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/include/glib-2.0 -I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/include/libxml2 -I/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/include/pango-1.0
$ pkg-config --libs libgnomeprint-2.2
-Wl,--export-dynamic -L/home/chema/cvs/gnome2/lib -lgnomeprint-2-2 -lart_lgpl_2 -lxml2 -lz -lm -lpango-1.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0

The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So to compile a simple libgnomeprint program, you would type the following:

$ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libgnomeprint-2.2` gnome-print-sample.c -o gnome-print-sample