Re: [pdf-devel] About Gnu-PDFlib and Poppler

[Vincent Torri]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, Terje Bråten wrote:

> > > Would it speed up development of PDFlib if this project just copied some
> > > code from poppler? Has anyone thought about that?
> >
> > poppler is actually the library version of Xpdf rendering code +
> > improvements. So the API is fixed and comes from old code
> >
> > gnu pdf is written from scratch, with maybe better API
> >
> > note that there is another pdf library : mupdf, which is used by
> > ghostscript. Also written from scratch.
>
> I just find it strange that when there is at least 3 free software pdf
> libraries out there, all the work has to be done over again each time.

speed, memory consumption, etc.. All of that can be a reason to write 
another library. And sometimes, the design is such that you have to write 
another lib from scratch. For example, mupdf is better for embedded device 
(a *lot* faster) than poppler. I can't say about gnu pdf as, iirc, it's 
not working yet.

> > PDFLib: C, GPL3
> > poppler: C++, GPL2
> >
> > How much code do you think they (can) technically and legally share?
> >
> > Best
> >    Martin
>
> Yes, I guess different language and different license are two main
> problems. What about mupdf then? Well, I guess I can have look at that
> myself later.

mupdf : C, GPL3

Vincent Torri