Problems Installing pdf-tools on MacOs - ARM64

Question

I have problems getting pdf-tools to run on Emacs (from railwaycat) on MacOs - ARM64 i.e. on Apple Silicon.

GNU Emacs 29.1 (build 1, aarch64-apple-darwin21.6.0, Carbon Version 165 AppKit 2113.6) of 2023-08-08

I installed the pdf-tools without problems (via the drop-down-menu)

    pdf-tools   1.1.0   installed    Support library for PDF documents

but when I execute the standard activation command

 (pdf-tools-install) 

which tries to compile the poppler server, I get warnings and linker errors:

ld: warning: ignoring file /usr/local/opt/gettext/lib/libintl.dylib, 
building for macOS-arm64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64

 [...]

ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture arm64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make[1]: *** [epdfinfo] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
===========================
 Build failed.  ;o(    
===========================

Any ideas how can get the compiler to link with ARM64 dynlibs or how to provide/create these?

Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

It would be helpful to know how did you install that Emacs version. Taking into account the error messages, you have somewhere a wrong Emacs version. I suggest to use brew, it will install/compile from sources, so here are some steps to follow to have success:

• remove your actual Emacs installation
• install macOS command line tools, with xcode-select --install
• install brew from this page (needs previous item)
• in your terminal type brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport
• optional brew info emacs-mac to see all dependencies that will be installed
• now brew install emacs-mac --with-modules

The installation process will download the source code, will apply some patches (I guess you did not do that step), and then usual autoconfig, make, make-install will follow (~5 min).

Once you have that, start Emacs from /opt/homebrew/opt/emacs-mac/Emacs.app, and then install pdf-tools.

Note: I tested yesterday the above steps, pdf-tools installs and work OK, M1 machine.