1.3 Configuration

The first step in the build process is the configuration. It is performed by a script called configure, present at the top level of the source tree. That script will guess various system-dependent features and characteristics and then setup the build system to properly operate underneath the system configure ran. The files yielded by the build process will be placed into a directory hierarchy created by configure, immediately below the directory in which it runs. Thus, in order to not pollute the source tree, as well as assure its integrity, we recommend you invoke the script configure from a directory other than the source’s. In this documentation, we denote the source directory absolute name, alternatively its name relative to the build directory, by srcdir.

It is possible to manually tune some properties of the build system by means of command line switches and environment variables, which are discussed in the following paragraphs.

There are some articles, remarkably Translations of the Term “Free Software”, that contains an invariant set of expressions in several different language scripts. To maximize compatibility and coherence among all output formats the expressions are written in plain text UTF-8 encoded files which are included in plain text format for both aggregate types (collection and standalone), but are rendered as PNG (Portable Network Graphics) or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), as required by the specific back-end, in order to be included or referenced by formats that allow graphical representation. To achieve successfully the rendering of all scripts, it is necessary an Unicode font that comprises all required glyph. By default configure script searches the system for GNU Unifont, the standard font GNU philosophy build system uses to do such rendering task. To override the default and select another font of your choice you can use the configure option --with-font=font-name where font-name is one of the names given in the list of available font names obtained by

srcdir/configure --with-font=list

You can also explicitly specify a font file-name as in:

srcdir/configure \
--with-font=/home/gnu/share/fonts/unifont-6.3.20131020.ttf

Notice that there is a bug in ImageMagick program convert that prevents certain font formats from working properly. See Bugs.

You can override the guesses of configure script about the GNU Texinfo command makeinfo and the ImageMagick command convert by setting the environment variables MAKEINFO and CONVERT, respectively. The guesses about the PO4A utilities po4a and po4a-gettextize are overridden by the environment variables PO4A and PO4A_GETTEXTIZE, respectively.