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@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +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 maintenence 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 situaion. 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 doesn'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. + + Kristian Høgsberg, Feb. 27, 2005 + + +See the README-XPDF for the original xpdf-3.00 README. |