The pdf-tools Wiki is maintained at https://pdftools.wiki. Head to the site if you find it easier to navigate a website for reading a manual. All the topics on the site are listed at https://pdftools.wiki/impulse.
This rendering is performed by a special library named, for whatever reason, poppler, running inside a server program. This program is called epdfinfo and its job is to successively read requests from Emacs and produce the proper results, i.e. the PNG image of a PDF page.
Actually, displaying PDF files is just one part of pdf-tools. Since poppler can provide us with all kinds of information about a document and is also able to modify it, there is a lot more we can do with it. Watch this video for a detailed demo!
pdf-tools requires a server epdfinfo to run against, which it will try to compile and build when it is activated for the first time.
You should not require any manual changes. The documentation below is only if you are installing from source, or for troubleshooting / debugging purposes. The following steps need to be followed in this order, to install pdf-tools and epdfinfo correctly:
- Installing
epdfinfoserver prerequisites - Installing the
epdfinfoserver - Installing
pdf-toolselisp prerequisites - Installing
pdf-toolselisp code
pdf-tools via NonGNU ELPA or MELPA, you don’t need to worry about this separate server installation at all. However, if you have a non-standard installation, please refer to the links below for installing epdfinfo server prerequisites.
Note: You’ll need GNU Emacs ≥ 26.1 and some form of a GNU/Linux OS. Other operating systems are not officially supported, but pdf-tools is known to work on many of them.
Similarly, package-managers are not officially supported, but pdf-tools is known to be available on some of them. See the section on Installing the epdfinfo server from package managers to avoid manual installation of server / server prerequisites.
See the section on I want to add support for pdf-tools on My Fav OS. How do I do that? to add your favorite Operating System to this list.
gcc), make, automake and autoconf.
Next we need to install a few libraries pdf-tools depends on, some of which are probably already on your system.
$ sudo apt install libpng-dev zlib1g-dev libpoppler-glib-devOn some older Ubuntu systems, the final command will possibly give an error. This should be no problem, since in some versions this package was contained in the main package libpoppler-dev. Also note, that zlib1g-dev was for a long time called libz-dev, which it still may be on your system.
Debian wheezy comes with libpoppler version 0.18, which is pretty old. The minimally required version is 0.16, but some features of pdf-tools depend on a more recent version of this library. See the following table for what they are and what version they require.
| You want to … | Required version |
|---|---|
| … create and modify text annotations. | ≥ 0.19.4 |
| … search case-sensitive. | ≥ 0.22 |
| … create and modify markup annotations. | ≥ 0.26 |
In case you decide to install libpoppler from source, make sure to run its configure script with the --enable-xpdf-headers option.
Finally there is one feature (following links of a PDF document by plain keystrokes) which requires imagemagick’s convert utility. This requirement is optional and you may install it like so:
$ sudo apt install imagemagickpdf-tools works well on macOS. You will need to install poppler which you can get with Homebrew via
$ brew install poppler automakeYou will also have to help pkg-config find some libraries by setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH. brew will show you which paths need to be added to PKG_CONFIG_PATH during the installation process. Make sure you export the paths to the env variable, eg:
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:$(brew --prefix libffi)/lib/pkgconfig/:/usr/local/Cellar/zlib/1.2.8/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig"or likewise within Emacs using setenv.
After that, compilation should proceed as normal.
Although not officially supported, it has been reported thatpdf-tools work well on FreeBSD. Instead of building pdf-tools, you can install one of the OS packages with e.g.
$ pkg install pdf-tools-emacs26To see the current list of pdf-tools packages for FreeBSD visit the Repology list.
To build pdf-tools from either MELPA or directly from the source repository, install the dependencies with
$ pkg install autotools gmake poppler-glibIf you choose not to install from MELPA, you must substitute gmake for make in the instructions below.
$ yum install poppler-devel poppler-glib-devel$ sudo dnf install make automake autoconf gcc libpng-devel zlib-devel poppler-glib-develThere is one feature (following links of a PDF document by plain keystrokes) which requires imagemagick’s convert utility. This requirement is optional and you may install it like so:
$ sudo dnf install imagemagick$ sudo zypper install make automake autoconf gcc libpng16-devel libpng16-compat-devel zlib-devel libpoppler-devel libpoppler-glib-devel glib2-develFor openSUSE MicroOS Desktop:
$ pkcon install make automake autoconf gcc libpng16-devel libpng16-compat-devel zlib-devel libpoppler-devel libpoppler-glib-devel glib2-develThere is one feature (following links of a PDF document by plain keystrokes) which requires imagemagick’s convert utility. This requirement is optional and you may install the imagemagick package via the package manager of your choice.
$ apk add build-base gcc automake autoconf libpng-dev glib-dev poppler-devpdf-tools can be built and used on Windows using the MSYS2 compiler, or pre-built binaries can be installed in MSYS2.
The pre-built binaries will work with native (not Cygwin) Windows builds of Emacs. They include the standard binaries provided by the GNU project, those available as MSYS2 packages and numerous third-party binaries. Refer to the appropriate section under Installing the epdfinfo server for more details.
pdf-tools will successfully compile using Cygwin, but it will not be able to open PDFs properly due to the way binaries compiled with Cygwin handle file paths.
pdf-tools via NonGNU ELPA or MELPA, you don’t need to worry about this separate server installation at all. However, if you have a non-standard installation, please refer to the links below for installing epdfinfo.
Note that this is the only officially supported method for installing the epdfinfo binary. Instructions:
$ cd /path/to/pdf-tools
$ make -sThis should compile the source code and create a Emacs Lisp Package in the root directory of the project. The configure script also tells you at the very end, which features, depending on the libpoppler version, will be available. These commands should give no error, otherwise you are in trouble.
If using the GNU binaries for Windows, support for PNG and zlib must first be installed by copying the appropriate dlls into emacs’ bin/ directory. Most third-party binaries come with this already done.
First, install MSYS2 and update the package database and core packages using the instructions provided. Then, to compile pdf-tools itself:
- Open msys2 shell
- Update and install dependencies, skipping any you already have
$ pacman -Syu $ pacman -S base-devel $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-poppler $ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-imagemagick - Install
pdf-toolsin Emacs, but do not try to compile the server. Instead, get a separate copy of the source somewhere else.$ git clone https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools - Open
mingw64shell (Note: You must usemingw64.exeand notmsys2.exe) - Compile pdf-tools
$ cd /path/to/pdf-tools $ make -s - This should produce a file
server/epdfinfo.exe. Copy this file into thepdf-tools/installation directory in your Emacs. - Start Emacs and activate the package.
M-x pdf-tools-install RET - Test.
M-x pdf-info-check-epdfinfo RET
If this is successful, (pdf-tools-install) can be added to Emacs’ config. See the note on how to set up PATH in the previous section.
Users installing Emacs from the MSYS2 distribution can install pre-built binaries of the epdfinfo server.
- Install MSYS2 and update the package database and core packages using the instructions provided.
- Install packages:
pacman -Ss mingw-w64-x86_64-{emacs,emacs-pdf-tools-server,imagemagick}(ImageMagick is optional, see above.) - Make sure Emacs can find
epdfinfo.exe. Either add the MINGW install location (e.g.C:/msys2/mingw64/bin) to the system path withsetx PATH "C:\msys2\mingw64\bin;%PATH%"~ or set Emacs's path with ~(setenv "PATH" (concat "C:\\msys64\\mingw64\\bin;" (getenv "PATH"))). Note that libraries from other GNU utilities, such as Git for Windows, may interfere with those needed bypdf-tools.pdf-info-check-epdinfowill succeed, but errors occur when trying to view a PDF file. This can be fixed by ensuring that the MSYS libraries are always preferred. - Add
(pdf-tools-install)to your Emacs config.
pdf-tools package.
| Package | Required version |
|---|---|
| tablist | >= 0.70 |
make produced the ELP file pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar you are fine. This package contains all the necessary files for Emacs and may be installed by either using
$ make install-packageor executing the Emacs command
M-x package-install-file RET pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar RETTo complete the installation process, you need to activate the package by putting the code below somewhere in your .emacs. Alternatively, and if you care about startup time, you may want to use the loader version instead.
(pdf-tools-install) ; Standard activation command
(pdf-loader-install) ; On demand loading, leads to faster startup timeOnce the Installation process is complete, check out Easy Help for PDF Tools features and Configuring PDF Tools features to get started!
Some day you might want to update this package viagit pull and then reinstall it. Sometimes this may fail, especially if Lisp-Macros are involved and the version hasn’t changed. To avoid this kind of problems, you should delete the old package via list-packages, restart Emacs and then reinstall the package.
This also applies when updating via package and MELPA.
- View
- View PDF documents in a buffer with DocView-like bindings. More information here.
- Isearch
- Interactively search PDF documents like any other buffer, either for a string or a PCRE.
- Occur
- List lines matching a string or regexp in one or more PDF documents.
- Follow
- Click on highlighted links, moving to some part of a different page, some external file, a website or any other URI. Links may also be followed by keyboard commands.
- Annotations
- Display and list text and markup annotations (like underline), edit their contents and attributes (e.g. color), move them around, delete them or create new ones and then save the modifications back to the PDF file. More information here.
- Attachments
- Save files attached to the PDF-file or list them in a dired buffer.
- Outline
- Use
imenuor a special buffer (M-x pdf-outline) to examine and navigate the PDF’s outline. - SyncTeX
- Jump from a position on a page directly to the TeX source and vice versa.
- Virtual
- Use a collection of documents as if it were one, big single PDF.
- Misc
-
- Display PDF’s metadata.
- Mark a region and kill the text from the PDF.
- Keep track of visited pages via a history.
- Apply a color filter for reading in low light conditions.
pdf-tools, opening a PDF in Emacs will automatically trigger this mode.
| Navigation | |
|---|---|
| Scroll Up / Down by Page-full | space / backspace |
| Scroll Up / Down by Line | C-n / C-p |
| Scroll Right / Left | C-f / C-b |
| First Page / Last Page | < / > |
| Next Page / Previous Page | n / p |
| First Page / Last Page | M-< / M-> |
| Incremental Search Forward / Backward | C-s / C-r |
| Occur (list all lines containing a phrase) | M-s o |
| Jump to Occur Line | RETURN |
| Pick a Link and Jump | F |
| Incremental Search in Links | f |
| History Back / Forwards | l / r |
| Display Outline | o |
| Jump to Section from Outline | RETURN |
| Jump to Page | M-g g |
| Store position / Jump to position in register | m / ~’~ |
Note that pdf-tools renders the PDF as images inside Emacs. This means that all the keybindings of image-mode work on individual PDF pages as well.
| Image Mode | |
|---|---|
| image-scroll-right | C-x > / <remap> <scroll-right> |
| image-scroll-left | C-x < / <remap> <scroll-left> |
| image-scroll-up | C-v / <remap> <scroll-up> |
| image-scroll-down | M-v / <remap> <scroll-down> |
| image-forward-hscroll | C-f / right / <remap> <forward-char> |
| image-backward-hscroll | C-b / left / <remap> <backward-char> |
| image-bob | <remap> <beginning-of-buffer> |
| image-eob | <remap> <end-of-buffer> |
| image-bol | <remap> <move-beginning-of-line> |
| image-eol | <remap> <move-end-of-line> |
| image-scroll-down | <remap> <scroll-down> |
| image-scroll-up | <remap> <scroll-up> |
| image-scroll-left | <remap> <scroll-left> |
| image-scroll-right | <remap> <scroll-right> |
| Display | |
|---|---|
| Zoom in / Zoom out | + / - |
| Fit Height / Fit Width / Fit Page | H / W / P |
| Trim Margins (set slice to bounding box) | s b |
| Reset Margins | s r |
| Reset Zoom | 0 |
pdf-tools supports working with PDF Annotations. You can display and list text and markup annotations (like squiggly, highlight), edit their contents and attributes (e.g. color), move them around, delete them or create new ones and then save the modifications back to the PDF file.
| Annotations | |
|---|---|
| List Annotations | C-c C-a l |
| Jump to Annotations from List | SPACE |
| Mark Annotation for Deletion | d |
| Delete Marked Annotations | x |
| Unmark Annotations | u |
| Close Annotation List | q |
| Enable/Disable Following Annotations | C-c C-f |
| Add and Edit Annotations | Select region via Mouse selection. |
| Then left-click context menu OR keybindings below | |
| Add a Markup Annotation | C-c C-a m |
| Add a Highlight Markup Annotation | C-c C-a h |
| Add a Strikeout Markup Annotation | C-c C-a o |
| Add a Squiggly Markup Annotation | C-c C-a s |
| Add an Underline Markup Annotation | C-c C-a u |
| Add a Text Annotation | C-c C-a t |
| Syncing with AUCTeX | |
|---|---|
| Refresh File (e.g., after recompiling source) | g |
| Jump to PDF Location from Source | C-c C-g |
| Jump Source Location from PDF | C-mouse-1 |
| Miscellaneous | |
|---|---|
| Print File | C-c C-p |
M-x pdf-tools-help RETRun M-x pdf-tools-help inside Emacs, as shown above. It will list all the features provided by pdf-tools as well as the key-bindings for these features.
pdf-tools, you probably want to customize the behavior of the features as per your requirements. Full customization of features is available by running the following:
M-x pdf-tools-customize RETpdf-tools does not work well together with linum-mode and activating it in a pdf-view-mode, e.g. via global-linum-mode, might make Emacs choke.
This mode is an alternative to linum-mode and is available since Emacs 26. pdf-tools does not work well with it. For example, it makes horizontal navigation (such as C-f, C-b, C-x < or C-x > ) in a document impossible.
Autorevert works by polling the file-system every auto-revert-interval seconds, optionally combined with some event-based reverting via file notification. But this currently does not work reliably, such that Emacs may revert the PDF-buffer while the corresponding file is still being written to (e.g. by LaTeX), leading to a potential error.
With a recent AUCTeX installation, you might want to put the following somewhere in your dotemacs, which will revert the PDF-buffer after the TeX compilation has finished.
(add-hook 'TeX-after-compilation-finished-functions #'TeX-revert-document-buffer)- Keybindings for navigating PDF documents
- Keybindings for working with Annotations
- Keybindings for manipulating display of PDF
- Keybindings for working with AUCTeX
- Keybindings for miscellaneous features in PDF tools
M-x pdf-tools-toggle-debug RETToggling debug mode prints information about various operations in the *Messages* buffer, and this is useful to see what is happening behind the scenes
pdf-tools folder and run make test to run the ERT tests and check if the changes you have made to the code break any of the tests.
The tests are written in ERT, which is the built-in testing system in Emacs. However, they are run using Cask which you will have to install first, if you don’t have it already. You can install Cask by following the instructions on their site at https://github.com/cask/cask
pdf-tools folder and run make server-test to check if the changes you have made to the server code break compilation on any of the supported operating systems.
The tests build Podman images for all supported operating systems, so you will have to install Podman first, if you don’t have already. You can install Podman by following the instructions on their site at https://podman.io/getting-started/installation
Podman is compatible with Docker, so if you already have docker installed, you should be able to alias podman=docker on your shell and run the tests, without having to install Docker. (Note: I have not tested this)
server/test/docker folder contains Dockerfile templates used for testing that the epdfinfo server compiles correctly on various operating systems (more details here).
To see the list of operating systems where compilation testing is supported, run make server-test-supported. To see the list of operating systems where testing is unsupported, run make server-test-unsupported. To add support, look into the server/test/docker/templates folder (ubuntu files are a good example to refer to)
(setq pdf-view-use-scaling t)to scale the images correctly when rendering them.
pdf-tools supports the 3 latest versions of Emacs major releases. At the moment of this writing, this means that the minimum supported Emacs version is 26.1.
I’m working on automating pdf-tools installation as much as possible, in order to improve the installation experience. If you want to add support for a new / currently unsupported Operating System, please modify the server/autobuild script. Say you want to support a new Operating System called MyFavOS. You need to do the following work:
- Add a call to
os_myfavosunderhandle-optionsat the end of the existing call chain. Here we try and pick up the correct Operating System and install the relevant dependencies. - Add handling for the
--osargument inos_argumentformyfavos, so that the appropriate function can be called to install pre-requisites.--osis the argument that we pass to the script from the command-line to indicate which OS we are on. - Create a
os_myfavosfunction. This function checks if we are running on MyFavOS. If we are running on MyFavOS, it sets upPKGCMD,PKGARGSandPACKAGESvariables so that the appropriate package manager can install the dependencies as part of the rest of theautobuildscript. - If you are adding support for your favorite operating system, consider adding automated testing support as well, to help me ensure that
epdfinfocontinues to compile correctly. See Add a Dockerfile to automate server compilation testing for more details.
The idea here is to make the server/autobuild file the single place from which installation can happen on any Operating System. This makes building pdf-tools dead simple via the Makefile.
This seems like a lot of work, but it is not. If you need a reference, search for os_gentoo or os_debian in the server/autobuild file and see how these are setup and used. The functions are used to install dependencies on Gentoo and Debian respectively, and are simple to copy / change.
When you make your changes, please be sure to test the elisp changes as well as the server code changes as described in the linked articles.
There have been a number of issues aroundpdf-tools installation problems on M1. M-x pdf-tools-install throws the following stack trace:
1 warning generated. ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/opt/gettext/lib/libintl.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/glib/2.72.1/lib/libglib-2.0.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/poppler/22.02.0/lib/libpoppler-glib.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/glib/2.72.1/lib/libgobject-2.0.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/poppler/22.02.0/lib/libpoppler.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/cairo/1.16.0_5/lib/libcairo.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/libpng/1.6.37/lib/libpng16.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 ld: warning: ignoring file /opt/homebrew/Cellar/zlib/1.2.11/lib/libz.dylib, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-arm64 Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
This happens because M1 architecture is ARM64, whereas the Emacs App you are using has been compiled for the x86_64 architecture. The way to solve this problem is to install a version of Emacs which has been compiled for the M1. As of today, [2022-05-09 Mon], the latest version of Emacs available on https://emacsformacosx.com/ is natively compiled and you will not face these issues on it. Please remove your current Emacs App and install it from https://emacsformacosx.com/.
Thank you.
PS: How do I know if the Emacs I’m running has been compiled correctly?
You can see this by opening the Activity Monitor, selecting Emacs, clicking on the Info key, and then clicking on Sample. The Code Type field in the Sample output will show you how your Application has been compiled. Here is the output for EmacsForMacOSX (you can see that it’s ARM64):
Sampling process 61824 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples Sampling completed, processing symbols... Analysis of sampling Emacs-arm64-11 (pid 61824) every 1 millisecond Process: Emacs-arm64-11 [61824] Path: /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs-arm64-11 Load Address: 0x1007f0000 Identifier: org.gnu.Emacs Version: Version 28.1 (9.0) Code Type: ARM64 Platform: macOS
If your Emacs is compiled for x86, the Code Type will be x86_64.