[Podofo-users] podofo vs. libpoppler: What should a pdf-parsing application use?

[Frank <fr...@ku...>]

Dear podofo developers,

I am a Debian developer interested in eliminating redundant copies of
xpdf code from our distribution, since the multiple copies of different
versions were a nightmare for our security team.  In particular I'm
interested in pdfTeX, which also uses xpdf code currently.

I would like to suggest the pdfTeX upstream developers to switch to a
library implementation instead of embedding xpdf code, and I'm wondering
whether you recommend using podofo.

Switching to libpoppler would be much easier in terms of code changes,
since it is a xpdf fork, but it has other drawbacks: Most importantly,
the C-only API/ABI is not well-defined and therefore unstable.  Although
poppler developers are open to provide a C-only, non-rendering library
with properly defined API, there doesn't seem to be anyone around who
will actually write the code and documentation.  And the poppler API
isn't documented well at all, anyway.

Therefore I wonder whether you consider podofo as an alternative, for
production use and multiplatform (including Windows and OS/2).=20=20

What pdftex does with the xpdf code currently has been described by its
maintainer:=20

,----
| pdfTeX uses xpdf to include pages from pdfs
| into the pdfs it produces, so we need everything to be able to parse,
| copy and manipulate the document, it's pages and their objects.
`----

Many thanks in advance,

Frank





--=20
Dr. Frank K=FCster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Z=
=FCrich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)