[poppler] Poppler as a library for parsing and manipulating PDF files?

[Frank Küster]

Hi,

HEADLINE: Should Poppler be used as a library for parsing and
          manipulating PDF files?

I'm the maintainer of teTeX in Debian, a package that includes pdftex
and therefore a copy of xpdf code.  We've been bitten by the security
issues in xpdf in the past, in particular because our xpdf version is
usually older than the one the patches are made for.

Therefore we always longed [1] for a shared library that we could use
instead of our xpdf code copy, and in fact it is technically easy to use
libpoppler[2].  However, I'm concerned whether you will support such
uses in the future.  The poppler website describes the software as "a
PDF rendering library", but *rendering* is not what pdftex does (nor do
pdftohtml, pdftk, and other candidates that face a similar situation).
Instead, the functionality is used to analyse the PDF structure, to
extract parts, and to even manipulate them (pdftk is designed for this).

Therefore I'd like to know whether you plan any changes that might
affect such uses of poppler, and whether you actually encourage such
use. 

Thank you in advance,
Frank


[1] http://bugs.debian.org/252104
[2] See the announcement at
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2005/12/msg00801.html
    and the patch at http://people.debian.org/~frank/patch-poppler (our
    SVN repository at http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-tetex/ seems to be
    inaccessible by http currently)

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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