[poppler] poppler 0.5 release coming up soon

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Hi,

Everybody tells me that it's time for a new poppler release, so I've 
been looking through bugzilla to figure out where we are.  This is the 
pending work, features and bugs that I'd like to get resolved before 
doing a 0.5 release:

  - Make installation of xpdf header files a ./configure option
  - Land Jonathans docs for the glib bindings
  - Nickolay is working on a fix for another selection crasher #4481
  - I want to look into #3975, #5073, #5117, #5243, #4648, and #4515 and 
ideally fix all those before doing the 0.5 release.
  - There seems to be an issue with PS output with CVS head, I haven't 
investigated much, but the generated PS doesn't work with ghostscript.

Did I miss anything?  Albert and Brad, did you guys finish the work on 
the Qt bindings you mentioned in irc?

The 0.5 release is going to be an experimental release.  The big change 
is the font matching code, where 0.5 switches to use fontconfig for 
matching all non-embedded fonts.  I expect this code to require some 
tweaking to work nicely, and we will have to come up with some 
fontconfig configuration recommendations for distributions.  Another big 
change in the 0.5 release is the merging of the xpdf 3.01 changes, which 
touched a lot of code and it will probably take some time before we 
shake out all the bugs from that work.

I think we should just go with the "uneven means unstable" versioning 
convention, so once we're happy with 0.5, we release 0.6.0 and make a 
0.6 branch.  So what's the plan for 0.5?  I'm open to suggestions, but 
here's a few ideas:

  - Add a set of xpdf compatible command line tools that links against 
libpoppler.so so distributions wont have to ship xpdf to get the 
pdftops, pdftotext etc utilities.
  - Improve gradient support to let backends fill gradients instead of 
breaking them down into solid color polygons.
  - Selection by words and lines (double and triple click drags).
  - Get Qt bindings to a point where kpdf can start using them.

But at any time we may just have to wrap up what we have if kpdf or 
evince needs a stable release.

cheers,
Kristian