Tag Archives: mavericks

How to build Qt 4.8.5 on Mac OS X 10.9

I prefer to build Qt from source. I have been trying to build Qt 4.8.5 on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). I managed in the end, but it took a few tweaks. Online information about how to do this was fragmentary, so I am documenting it here in case it is useful to someone else.

1. Webkit doesn’t build. I don’t need it so I disabled it using configure option:

-no-webkit

2. The corewlan plugin doesn’t build. I don’t need it (I think, I’ve never heard of it before) so I disabled it using this fix from stackoverflow.

3. The TIFF image format plugin doesn’t build. I don’t need it so I disabled it using configure option:

-no-libtiff

My final configure command was:

./configure -nomake demos -nomake examples -debug-and-release -no-multimedia -no-audio-backend -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -no-gif -no-openssl -no-webkit -no-libtiff

There will be lots of warnings that Qt 4.8.5 isn’t compatible with Mac OS X 10.9. But you can ignore these (or comment out the warning in the appropriate Qt header file).

I have done some brief experiments and it seems to work ok. Hopefully there will be a Qt 4.8.6 that fixes these issues. Note that you also need to make some tweaks to your application code. See:

Fixing Qt 4 for Mac OS X 10.9

** UPDATE April-2014 **

Qt 4.8.6 has been released. This appears to build fine on Mac OS X 10.9.

Fixing Qt 4 for Mac OS X 10.9

Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) was released yesterday. And those nice people at Apple made it free, so you can be sure lots of people are downloading it. However Qt 4 apps look at bit strange on the new OS. Look at the text alignment in these buttons:

buttons1The text isn’t centre aligned. It doesn’t look like much of an issue out of context. But it looks wrong when you look at a whole UI. The good news is that there is a simple fix:

#ifdef Q_OS_MACX
    if ( QSysInfo::MacintoshVersion > QSysInfo::MV_10_8 )
    {
        // fix Mac OS X 10.9 (mavericks) font issue
        // https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-32789
        QFont::insertSubstitution(".Lucida Grande UI", "Lucida Grande");
    }
#endif

You need to place this code in your main() before creating your QApplication. For more details see this bug report.

With the fix the buttons look like this:

buttons2Much better! There are some console warnings:

CoreText performance note: Client called CTFontCreateWithName() using
name "Lucida Grande" and got font with PostScript name "LucidaGrande". 
For best performance, only use PostScript names when calling this API.

I am not sure how how significant these are.

I have also found that updating to Qt 4.8.5 fixes a printing crash bug in my table plan software. This crash happened when rotated pixmaps were printed from Mac OS X 10.8.

I have seen on forums that Qt 5 is completely broken on 10.9. But I don’t know if that is true.