On all platforms, MuPDF builds a C library that offers the standard C level API as defined within this book. MuPDF is written in C and thus this C API is the basis for all the other language bindings described here. All new functionality will be exposed in the C API first. Other language bindings (as described in later sections) are built on top of the C API, sometimes by custom, hand-written code, sometimes by automated tools.
By default we build a static library. Dynamic libraries can be built, but we do not guarantee ABI compatibility between releases, so we do not provide this on all platforms by default.
The standard Unix makefile requires GNU Make, and detects the presence of the third party libraries within the thirdparty directory. If present, these are used in preference to any system libraries.
The standard Visual Studio Solution requires Visual Studio 2019, and relies upon the presence of the third party libraries as above. No facility is offered as standard for using system libraries, but this should not be hard for an experienced user of Visual Studio to customize.
Our libraries frequently contain bug fixes to the standard ones, and we attempt to pass such fixes upstream to the main package maintainers. Given that all our regression and quality control testing happens with the versions that we supply, we prefer people to use our versions, and will frequently ask for bug reports to be reproduced using such a build before investing too much time in trying to solve them.