# Usage — fmt 3.0.0 documentation
Small, safe and fast formatting library
Author: Victor Zverovich
Keywords: C++, formatting, printf, string, library

# Usage

To use the fmt library, add `format.h` and `format.cc` from a release archive or the Git repository to your project. Alternatively, you can build the library with CMake.

If you are using Visual C++ with precompiled headers, you might need to add the line

    #include "stdafx.h"

before other includes in `format.cc`.

## Building the library

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 `<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 make.

Once the library has been built you can invoke make test to run the tests.

If you use Windows and have Visual Studio installed, a `FORMAT.sln` file and several `.vcproj` files will be created. You can then build them using Visual Studio or msbuild.

On Mac OS X with Xcode installed, an `.xcodeproj` file will be generated.

To build a shared library set the `BUILD_SHARED_LIBS` CMake variable to `TRUE`:

    cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=TRUE ...

## Building the documentation

To build the documentation you need the following software installed on your system:

- Python with pip and virtualenv
- Doxygen
- Less with less-plugin-clean-css

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 documentation in `doc/html`.

## Android NDK

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.

## Homebrew

fmt can be installed on OS X using Homebrew:

    brew install cppformat