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

[Frank Küster]

Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> wrote:

> Kristian Høgsberg <krh at bitplanet.net> wrote:
>
>> I really like this idea, and it ties in with the original reasons for
>> creating the poppler library - to consolidate all the copies of the
>> xpdf codebase floating around into one shared library.  The only
>> reservation I have is that we've been trying to wrap up the xpdf API
>> that tetex (and cups and others) use in a smaller, simpler API with
>> glib and qt bindings.  To motivation for this is that the xpdf API is
>> basically an internal API that wasn't designed to be installed as
>> public headers. It's a huge API (80+ C++ header files) and it exposes
>> too much of the xpdf internals.  Thus, it is not really possible to
>> give any kind of API/ABI guarantee for this interface, since
>> everything except the smallest changes are going to cause at least ABI
>> breakage.

Yes, this was one other thing that I thought about.  Before I knew that
poppler existed I even tried to create a libxpdf from the xpdf sources,
and while it worked technically, I gave up because I soon found out that
I would have to actually understand the code to be able to define which
symbols to expose.

>> Another issue is that libpoppler.so currently pulls in a number of X
>> libraries and the cairo stack if you enable that.  That shouldn't be
>> too hard to work around though, we could just move those dependencies
>> to the wrapper libraries (libpoppler-glib.so etc).

That would be a great improvement.  I'm probably not the right person to
provide patches for this - I'm a C novice and don't know any C++.  Would
the poppler team be willing to do this?

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