[poppler] poppler as Plugin for FF?

[Krzysztof Kowalczyk]

On 7/6/06, Vincent Torri <vtorri at univ-evry.fr> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
>
> > On 7/6/06, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
> >> A Dijous 06 Juliol 2006 17:30, Thomas Zühlke va escriure:
> >> > Hi *,
> >> >
> >> > I try to write a PDF plugin for the Firefox browser for Windows xp,
> >> > because not all PDF features are supported by the Adobe PDF plugin.
> >> > The feature i need is the annotation of some text of the PDF file.
> >> >
> >> > Is it possible to compile the poppler library under windows (VS 2003) and
> >> > show some PDF files with it?
> >>
> >> Yes
> >
> > That's not really true. You would have to spend at least a day or 2
> > making portability fixes and writing project files for VS.
>
> Isn't it possible to compile poppler with msys/mingw ? (so without
> ressource file, using autofoo stuff)

The original question was about compiling with VS.

As to your question, I'm sure anything is possible given enough work.
I doubt it will compile out-of-the box. I can't even compile latest
CVS version of poppler on generic Ubuntu because autogen.sh fails
miserably, so chances that it'll just work under cygwin or mingw are
slim.

But in the end: why would you want to do it? msys/mingw is good for
cheap ports of Unix code to windows, when there is absolutely no other
option. Even when they work, the resulting binary is usually way below
Windows standards from the user point of view and the developer
experience is much worse.

Windows developers are comfortable with Visual Studio and all the nice
things it has to offer, integrated debugger being the most important
thing. For most Windows developers setting up msys\mingw and learning
a whole new toolchain is too much effort for the benefit and it's not
as efficient as working from within Visual Studio.

-- kjk