To use the fmt library, add :file:`format.h` and :file:`format.cc` from a release archive or the Git repository to your project. Alternatively, you can :ref:`build the library with CMake <building>`.
If you are using Visual C++ with precompiled headers, you might need to add the line
#include "stdafx.h"
before other includes in :file:`format.cc`.
The included CMake build script can be used to build the fmt library on a wide range of platforms. CMake is freely available for download from http://www.cmake.org/download/.
CMake works by generating native makefiles or project files that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice. The typical workflow starts with:
mkdir build # Create a directory to hold the build output. cd build cmake <path/to/fmt> # Generate native build scripts.
where :file:`{<path/to/fmt>}` is a path to the fmt repository.
If you are on a *nix system, you should now see a Makefile in the current directory. Now you can build the library by running :command:`make`.
Once the library has been built you can invoke :command:`make test` to run the tests.
If you use Windows and have Visual Studio installed, a :file:`FORMAT.sln` file and several :file:`.vcproj` files will be created. You can then build them using Visual Studio or msbuild.
On Mac OS X with Xcode installed, an :file:`.xcodeproj` file will be generated.
To build a shared library set the BUILD_SHARED_LIBS CMake variable to
TRUE:
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=TRUE ...
To build the documentation you need the following software installed on your system:
First generate makefiles or project files using CMake as described in
the previous section. Then compile the doc target/project, for example:
make doc
This will generate the HTML documenation in doc/html.
fmt provides Android.mk file that can be used to build the library with Android NDK. For an example of using fmt with Android NDK, see the android-ndk-example repository.
fmt can be installed on OS X using Homebrew:
brew install cppformat