[poppler] Should we aim for having utils only using public API, ideally cpp/ ?

[Even Rouault]

On lundi 13 janvier 2020 23:02:50 CET Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El dilluns, 13 de gener de 2020, a les 8:49:14 CET, Oliver Sander va 
escriure:
> > I think that this is a worthy goal, but out priority should be guided by
> > the APIs that downstream users actually need right now.  For example,
> > LibreOffice has its own OutputDev implementation, and would benefit from a
> > standardization of that interface.
> 
> We have asked third party uses of non public headers to come forward and
> describe their needs multiple times, we've always got a big silence as
> answer.

Not completely true ;-) The below message still holds:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2017-September/012515.html

I also see your answer
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2017-September/012521.html

I don't think I answered to it because I hadn't a lot to propose 
unfortunately. One aspect I didn't mention is that we have support for other 
PDF capable libraries (build options of GDAL) which offer low level access to 
PDF objects, so we have abstracted that a bit (the API underlying a Dict, a 
Stream, a Array, etc... are pretty much equivalent) for the upper level logic 
built on it. Hence having low level access to PDF objects is valuable to us.

As far as contributing something to Poppler itself, that's not entirely 
obvious as most of what we do is application specific. So for now we have no 
better choice than "happily" dealing with the breakages of the private API 
(I'm not complaining. This is in the contract of using it)

Best regards,

Even

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