Building Engauge Digitizer as arm64-native for macOS

31 Aug 2026
David Friedlander, NASA/GSFC

This is a made a lot easier by using MacPorts (or HomeBrew) to handle the dependencies.

MacPorts

1. Install dependencies

   sudo port install pkgconfig qt5 fftw-3 log4cpp poppler
   

2. Put Qt5 binaries in your PATH

   export PATH="/opt/local/libexec/qt5/bin:$PATH"  #bash/zsh syntax
   

3. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/akhuettel/engauge-digitizer.git
   cd engauge-digitizer
   

4. Tell Qt where the macOS icon is so it bundles it automatically

   echo "macx: ICON = src/img/digitizer.icns" >> engauge.pro
   

5. Generate the Makefile (injecting MacPorts paths to fix log4cpp/fftw3)

   qmake "CONFIG+=sdk_no_version_check" \
         "INCLUDEPATH+=/opt/local/include" \
         "LIBS+=-L/opt/local/lib" \
         engauge.pro
   

6. Compile

   make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)
   

7. (Optional) Bundle dependencies to make the app portable macdeployqt "Engauge Digitizer.app"

or for HomeBrew

1. Install dependencies

   brew install pkg-config qt@5 fftw log4cpp poppler
   

2. Put Qt5 binaries in your PATH

   export PATH="$(brew --prefix qt@5)/bin:$PATH"
   

(and then the same as above)

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David Friedlander
31 August 2026, HTML version: 14 October 2026