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

[Leonard Rosenthol]

At 02:41 PM 1/24/2006, Frank Küster wrote:
>I must admit that I do not know anything about the internals of
>xpdf/poppler, nor do I know a lot about the internal structure of PDF
>files.  But it's a fact that programs that do parse and manipulate PDF
>files, and in particular extract parts, already use xpdf code, and for
>pdftex it works equally well with libpoppler.  This is our list of
>includes:

         Since poppler includes a complete 
(slightly modified) version of Xpdf, there is no 
reason that you couldn't just point into the 
poppler install instead of having your own Xpdf copy.

         The only concern would be if


>So the question I have is whether any of these (unkown to me) functions
>might diverge from xpdf because your focus is on rendering, and become
>less useful for us.

         If they were to diverge, it wouldn't be 
for that reason.   And most of the code that you 
use in pdftex is very low level stuff that I 
would be surprised to see change in Poppler since 
it would have a MAJOR impact everything 
throughout the library and future patches from Xpdf.


>  I fear that's a bit tough to answer if I don't come
>up with function names.

         That's the other alternative.  For your 
team to develop a "higher level" API into 
Xpdf/Poppler that offers the functionality that 
you need.   Then, if someone were to change the 
lower level stuff, you wouldn't be effected.


Leonard

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:leonardr at pdfsages.com>
Chief Technical Officer                      <http://www.pdfsages.com>
PDF Sages, Inc.                              215-938-7080 (voice)
                                              215-938-0880 (fax)