Poppler is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

utility library for rendering

Portable Document Format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...

(PDF) documents. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org. It is commonly used on Linux systems, and is used by the PDF viewers of the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

and KDE

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a grap ...

s. The project was started by Kristian Høgsberg with two goals: to provide PDF rendering functionality as a

shared library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

, to centralize maintenance effort and to go beyond the goals of

Xpdf Xpdf is a free and open-source PDF viewer for operating systems supported by the Qt toolkit. Versions prior to 4.00 were written for the X Window System and Motif. Functions Xpdf runs on nearly any Unix-like operating system. Binaries are a ...

, and to integrate with functionality provided by modern

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s. As of the version 0.18 release in 2011, the poppler library represents a complete implementation of ISO 32000-1, the PDF format standard, and is the first major free PDF library to support its forms (only Acroforms but not full

XFA XFA (also known as XFA forms) stands for XML Forms Architecture, a family of proprietary XML specifications that was suggested and developed by JetForm to enhance the processing of web forms. It can be also used in PDF files starting with the PD ...

forms) and annotations features. Poppler is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of Xpdf-3.0, a PDF file viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph and Cog, LLC. The name ''Poppler'' comes from the animated series ''

Futurama ''Futurama'' is an American animated science fiction sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series follows the adventures of the professional slacker Philip J. Fry, who is cryogenically preserved for 1000 years ...

'' episode " The Problem with Popplers."

Applications

Notable free software applications using Poppler to render PDF documents include:

Features

Poppler can use two back-ends for drawing PDF documents,

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metr ...

and Splash. Its features may depend on which back-end it employs. A third back-end based on Qt4's painting framework "Arthur", is available, but is incomplete and no longer under active development. Bindings exist for Glib and

Qt5 Qt (pronounced "cute") is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems wi ...

, that provide interfaces to the Poppler backends, although the Qt5 bindings support only the Splash and Arthur backends. There is a patchset available to add support for the Cairo backend to the Qt5 bindings, but the Poppler project does not currently wish to integrate the feature into the library proper. Some characteristics of the back-ends include: * Cairo:

Anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display ...

, and transparent objects. ** Cairo does not smooth

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

images such as scanned documents. ** Cairo does not depend on the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

, so Poppler can run on other platforms like Wayland,

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. * Splash: Supports minification filtering of

s. Poppler comes with a text-rendering back-end as well, which can be invoked from the

command line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

utility pdftotext. It is useful for searching for strings in

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

s from the command line, using the utility

grep 


grep is a  command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the  ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sa ...

, for instance. Example: pdftotext file.pdf - , grep string Poppler partially supports annotations and Acroforms. It does not support JavaScript nor the rendering of full

forms.

poppler-utils

poppler-utils is a collection of

command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

utilities built on Poppler's library API, to manage PDF and extract contents: * pdfattach – add a new embedded file (attachment) to an existing PDF * pdfdetach – extract embedded documents from a PDF * pdffonts – lists the fonts used in a PDF *

pdfimages pdfimages is an open-source command-line utility for lossless extraction of images from PDF files, including JPEG2000 and JBIG2 format when used with option -all. It is freely available as part of poppler-utils and xpdf-utils, and included in many ...

– extract all embedded images at native resolution from a PDF * pdfinfo – list all information of a PDF * pdfseparate – extract single pages from a PDF * pdftocairo – convert single pages from a PDF to vector or bitmap formats using cairo * pdftohtml – convert PDF to HTML format retaining formatting * pdftoppm – convert a PDF page to a bitmap * pdftops – convert PDF to printable PS format * pdftotext – extract all text from PDF * pdfunite – merges several PDF

Notes

References

* Albert Astals Cid (29 August 2005
The Poppler Library
presentation at the 2005 KDE conference

External links