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- This is poppler, a PDF rendering library.
- Poppler is a fork of the xpdf PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg
- of Glyph and Cog, LLC. The purpose of forking xpdf is twofold.
- First, we want to provide PDF rendering functionality as a shared
- library, to centralize the maintenance effort. Today a number of
- applications incorporate the xpdf code base, and whenever a security
- issue is discovered, all these applications exchange patches and put
- out new releases. In turn, all distributions must package and release
- new version of these xpdf based viewers. It's safe to say that
- there's a lot of duplicated effort with the current situation. Even if
- poppler in the short term introduces yet another xpdf derived code
- base to the world, we hope that over time these applications will
- adopt poppler. After all, we only need one application to use poppler
- to break even.
- Second, we would like to move libpoppler forward in a number of areas
- that don't fit within the goals of xpdf. By design, xpdf depends on
- very few libraries and runs a wide range of X based platforms. This
- is a strong feature and reasonable design goal. However, with poppler
- we would like to replace parts of xpdf that are now available as
- standard components of modern Unix desktop environments. One such
- example is fontconfig, which solves the problem of matching and
- locating fonts on the system, in a standardized and well understood
- way. Another example is cairo, which provides high quality 2D
- rendering. See the file TODO for a list of planned changes.
- Please note that xpdf, and thus poppler, is licensed under the GPL,
- not the LGPL. Consequently, any application using poppler must also
- be licensed under the GPL. If you want to incorporate Xpdf based PDF
- rendering in a closed source product, please contact Glyph & Cog
- (www.glyphandcog.com) for commercial licensing options. Note that
- this only allows you to use xpdf in a closed source product,
- not poppler itself.
- Kristian Høgsberg, Feb. 27, 2005
- See the README-XPDF for the original xpdf-3.03 README.
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