Using C library in Android NDK with external dependency

Question

I have an OCR library written in C that I wish to run on Android using the Native Development Kit (NDK). I am an experienced Android developer, but not with the NDK (or C for that matter). I have set-up numerous hello world sample programs, and now I think that the first question I need to answer is:

The OCR library requires another dependency in the makefile: libtiff, which provides support for .TIFF image files. How can I add this dependency to the project and represent it in an Android.mk file? Can anyone link to any similar examples?

Here is some code from the OCR makefile:

TIFF    = {your_tiff_path}/libtiff.a
INCLUDES= {your_tiff_path}/include
DEFS    = -DDO_USE_32BIT -DLUT_POPCNT -DTIFF_FORMAT
OPT     = -O3
CFLAGS  = $(OPT) -g $(INCLUDES) $(PROFILE) $(DEFS)
# Add -m32 to build 32bit on 64bit machine
CC      = gcc -m32
LDFLAGS = $(OPT) $(PROFILE)

OBJECTS = cputime.o BitArr.o bits.o chardat.o symbol.o page.o get_skew.o \
    ccrx.o readtiff.o label.o glyph.o loadcontrols.o loadbestfont.o \
    qsegment.o makeBnodes.o makeLnodes.o runocr.o lineocr.o extract.o \
    splitchars.o compare.o scoreit.o lm_class.o lmdp.o \
    ocrfont.o glyphsubs.o binio.o ocrmain.o unicode.o

TARGET = ccr8

$(TARGET):  $(OBJECTS)
    $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(OBJECTS) $(TIFF) -lm -lc 

label.o:        label.c page.h CCR.h BitArr.h bits.h 
...
...
...

Answer 1

Use the "standalone toolchain" - this is a tool to reuse generic makefiles for Android. It is well described in the docs that you installed with the NDK.