Building pdf-tools on Windows

pdf-tools is a great package for viewing pdfs on Emacs. Building it sometimes can be a little challenging. Recently I built it for Emacs on Windows 11. Here I note down the steps to successfully build pdf-tools for Emacs on Windows 11.

Install MSYS2

On Windows, pdf-tools is built using pacman. We can install the necessary tools using MSYS2. Follow the installation steps there.

Build pdf-tools

Go to the directory that contains the autobuild script. For example, it will be located at pdf-tools/build/server/. Launch MSYS2 terminal and run ./autobuild.

The autobuild script does not recognize UCRT64 system. We need to change the system variable MSYSTEM to MINGW64. To do that, open Edit the system environment variables from control panel or just by searching on Windows. Click on environment variables and add a new variable MSYS2 with value MINGW64. After this, ./autobuild should run without error.