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Poppler
Developer(s)	freedesktop.org
Initial release	4 March 2005; 19 years ago
Stable release	24.09.0 / 1 September 2024; 26 days ago
Repository	gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler ;
Written in	C++
Operating system	Linux, Unix, BSD, Windows
Type	Library
License	GPLv2 or GPLv3
Website	poppler.freedesktop.org

Poppler is a free and open-source software library for rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org. Commonly used on Linux systems,^[4] it powers the PDF viewers of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

History

The project was started by Kristian Høgsberg with two goals:^[5] to provide PDF rendering functionality as a shared library, to centralize maintenance effort and to go beyond the goals of Xpdf, and to integrate with functionality provided by modern operating systems.

By the version 0.18 release in 2011, the poppler library represented a complete implementation of ISO 32000-1,^[4] the PDF format standard, and was the first major free PDF library to support its forms (only Acroforms but not full XFA forms)^[6]^[7] and annotations features.^[4]

Poppler is a fork of Xpdf-3.0, a PDF file viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph and Cog, LLC.^[5]^[8]

The name Poppler comes from "The Problem with Popplers," an episode of the animated series Futurama.^[8]

Applications

Notable free software applications using Poppler to render PDF documents include:^[9]

Application	GUI widgets
Evince	GTK
Inkscape	GTK
LibreOffice 4.x	GTK^[10]
Okular	Qt
pdftotext, pdftohtml, etc.	none
TeXstudio	Qt
TeXworks	Qt
xpopple	Motif
Zathura	GTK

Features

Poppler can use two back-ends for drawing PDF documents, Cairo 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.^[11] Bindings exist for Glib and Qt5, 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,^[12] but the Poppler project does not currently wish to integrate the feature into the library proper.^[13]

Some characteristics of the back-ends include:

Cairo: Anti-aliasing of vector graphics, and transparent objects.^[9]
- Cairo does not smooth bitmap images such as scanned documents.
- Cairo does not depend on the X Window System, so Poppler can run on other platforms like Wayland, Windows or macOS.
Splash: Supports minification filtering of bitmaps.^[9]

Poppler comes with a text-rendering back-end as well, which can be invoked from the command line utility pdftotext. It is useful for searching for strings in PDFs from the command line, using the utility grep, for instance.^[14]

Example:

pdftotext file.pdf - | grep string

Poppler partially supports annotations and Acroforms. It does not support JavaScript^[15] nor the rendering of full XFA forms.^[6]

poppler-utils

poppler-utils is a collection of command-line 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 – 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 PDFs