[poppler] poppler and TeX Live -- request for a few modifications

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Divendres, 14 d'octubre de 2011, Peter Breitenlohner vàreu escriure:
> Hallo,

Hi

> 
> 0. This is a request for a few modifications in the poppler sources in order
> to simplify the use of libpoppler for pdfTeX, luaTeX, and XeTeX in TeX
> Live.
> 
> Please answer directly because I am not subscribed to the this list.
> 
> Before going into any details, let me recapitulate a bit of history.
> 
> Before 2009 pdfTeX was built with a modified version of the xpdf sources in
> the TeX Live (TL) source tree.  Some, but not all, of these modifications
> were also applied to the xpdf distribution.  As far as I know the
> preprocessor macro PDF_PARSER_ONLY was introduces for the benefit of pdfTeX.
> When XeTeX and luaTeX were added to TL, they used the same modified xpdf
> sources.
> 
> In 2009 this was rewritten in terms of patches applied to the xpdf
> distribution and some of these patches were later included into the
> distribution.
> 
> Later in 2009 all three programs were modified such, that they could use
> and installed (system) poppler library instead of xpdf from the TL tree.
> 
> In 2011, new functionality in luaTeX required to always use poppler, and
> thus a subset of the poppler sources had to be added to the TL tree.  The
> present status is, that luaTeX and XeTeX always use libpoppler, either from
> the TL tree or a system version, whereas pdfTeX still uses xpdf from the TL
> tree or a system libpoppler.
> 
> At the moment we have to apply a few patches to poppler-0.18.0 as used in
> the TL tree.  These patches have to be adapted when upgrading to a newer
> poppler version -- an unecessary complication.  Therefore, we request that
> these patches discussed below be integrated into the poppler distribution.

I agree with you, it is an unnecessary complication, just use libpoppler 
library instead of compiling your own copy and everything is solved :-)

Albert

> 
> Regards
> Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>