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 maintenance 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 situation. 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 don'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.