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