Re: RFS: xpdf (updated package)
On Do, 03 Jun 2010, Rogério Brito wrote:
> Hi, there.
>
> On Jun 03 2010, Stanislav Maslovski wrote:
> > This change is for sure quite significant. BTW, do you know if the
> > internal code in xpdf is equivalent feature wise to poppler? I know
> > that poppler was a spin-off of the rendering code of xpdf. Do you know
> > how much they deviate one from another?
>
> I have been keeping in touch with Michael about such smaller version of
> xpdf and, in fact, I started a xpdf-poppler project, that I announced at
One more comment on that from the Debian TeX Team: As TeX is using
the xpdf code in several places, we (first Ubuntu patch, updated
regularly now by us and them together) patched the sources to
allow compilation with poppler and xpdf, and this was pushed also
upstream.
BUT: It is a BIG BIG BIG PITA!!!! Poppler people are simply completely
ignorant wrt to breaking API. If you look into the amount of
different patches we had to create for poppler 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 0.10, 0.12
and so on, I am sure this will continue.
SO actually I considered to switch back to the embedded xpdf code
for Debian texlive packages, just to get rid of that stupid problems:
"new poppler hits unstable, changes API at random, so texlive FTBFS"
In fact I never got any answer on my (more polite than here) requests
from them.
I am not sure if basing anything new on poppler is actually a good idea.
Martin Schröder once at a BachoTeX conference gave a good overview
on different pdf libraries, and I hope with time a decent one will show
up and be used in as many places as possible. Poppler people unfortunately
do everything to make this fail.
Best wishes
Norbert
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Norbert Preining preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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