Frank � wrote:
If the poppler developers now consider to no longer provide this unreliable "API", but offer to create one more library with a well-defined, reliable API for non-display uses - then I would say this is something that speaks *for* poppler. It seems to indicate that they care for their users (and don't try to hide the problems with using an undocumented API).
ok, i misunderstood that part; i was under the impression that it were another group who had to take up that api
If it turns out that the poppler people are not willing to listen to pdfTeX developers when it is about creating a non-display library version: Then we can still decide that we should not switch to poppler (or rather, for sure we will, since we don't want pdfTeX to be linked to qt or gtk or such).
it all depends on how portable to other platforms the library is; i assume that it is the intention to have it running on each platform then; concerning an api ... i think that the main question is to what extend we want to be able to manipulate the content of to-be-embedded objects (for instance in the perspective of merging annotations, changing colors, etc); i think that currently only font related objects are somehow manipulated; maybe martin/thanh can tell how much additional code is written for that on top of xpdf; maybe they have a kind of api spec already (i never looked into the source in detail)
b) people who have tried to maintain or build up a relationship to Derek have not been able to convince him to provide a shared library.
hm, i like static binaries (having only bad experiences with libs when updating but that's another story)
So while I have nothing against MuPDF, I still think some pdfTeX developer should get in touch with the poppler peopler and communicate with them. They have asked, and after all I expect that it will be much easier to switch to a poppler library that has been taylored along our wishes, than to MuPDF which exists independently and doesn't seem to have any relationship to the xpdf code we currently use.
it depends if mupdf will provide some manipulation features (hard to maintain independently) i happily leave cooking up a spec to the pdftex code wizzards, as long as they can guarantee that pdftex produces the same output on each platform; that's the part that worries me most because in general tex development has a rather bad history of cross platform code development (those os-wars). Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------