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2006/10/27, Frank Küster
recently more projects that do not need any of the fancy graphical interfaces are considering using poppler, e.g. CUPS. However, the poppler developers plan to make unavailable the old, undocumented, never planned and unmaintainable API of "plain libpoppler".
Whatever that is.
These two wishes together give us a fair chance that someone will actually do the work and develop a clean API for a plain C-only poppler, without any graphics payload. Therefore it would be nice if someone among the pdfTeX developers would take part in the discussion, in particular help answer the question in
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2006-October/002260.html
,---- | What functionality would the tetex people need exported from such an | API? `----
I just did.
At a short glance over pdftoepdf.cc and pdftosrc.cc, I only found these symbols:
Ref GfxFont GBool PDFDoc GString LinkDest Stream
But in fact there may be more - and you may also have some wishes about PDF parsing and manipulation that need to be added yet.
If we would start pdfTeX now, we would probably use much more (Taco, are you listening? :-). E.g. pdfTeX has a complete machinery for parsing font files, while poppler probably also has code for that. And the code for writing objects is also duplicated and quite low-level in pdfTeX. So there is definitely duplicate functionality. A very short term goal (i.e. 1.40) would be to have code in utils.c:initversionstring to handle the case where poppler is used instead of xpdf. And to have the patches you already distribute for using poppler in pdfTeX. Best Martin