39 lines
2 KiB
Text
39 lines
2 KiB
Text
This is poppler, a PDF rendering library.
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Poppler is a fork of the xpdf PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg
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of Glyph and Cog, LLC. The purpose of forking xpdf is twofold.
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First, we want to provide PDF rendering functionality as a shared
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library, to centralize the maintenance effort. Today a number of
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applications incorporate the xpdf code base, and whenever a security
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issue is discovered, all these applications exchange patches and put
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out new releases. In turn, all distributions must package and release
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new version of these xpdf based viewers. It's safe to say that
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there's a lot of duplicated effort with the current situation. Even if
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poppler in the short term introduces yet another xpdf derived code
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base to the world, we hope that over time these applications will
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adopt poppler. After all, we only need one application to use poppler
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to break even.
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Second, we would like to move libpoppler forward in a number of areas
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that don't fit within the goals of xpdf. By design, xpdf depends on
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very few libraries and runs a wide range of X based platforms. This
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is a strong feature and reasonable design goal. However, with poppler
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we would like to replace parts of xpdf that are now available as
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standard components of modern Unix desktop environments. One such
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example is fontconfig, which solves the problem of matching and
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locating fonts on the system, in a standardized and well understood
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way. Another example is cairo, which provides high quality 2D
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rendering. See the file TODO for a list of planned changes.
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Please note that xpdf, and thus poppler, is licensed under the GPL,
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not the LGPL. Consequently, any application using poppler must also
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be licensed under the GPL. If you want to incorporate Xpdf based PDF
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rendering in a closed source product, please contact Glyph & Cog
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(www.glyphandcog.com) for commercial licensing options. Note that
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this only allows you to use xpdf in a closed source product,
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not poppler itself.
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Kristian Høgsberg, Feb. 27, 2005
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See the README-XPDF for the original xpdf-3.03 README.
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