Xpdf

version 3.04 2014-may-28

The Xpdf software and documentation are copyright 1996-2014 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

Email: derekn@foolabs.com WWW: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

The PDF data structures, operators, and specification are copyright 1985-2006 Adobe Systems Inc.

What is Xpdf?

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities.

Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX and OS/2. The non-X components (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Windows and Mac OSX systems and should run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler. Xpdf will run on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

License & Distribution

Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Pulbic License (GPL), version 2 or 3. This means that you can distribute derivatives of Xpdf under any of the following:

• GPL v2 only
• GPL v3 only
• GPL v2 or v3

The Xpdf source package includes the text of both GPL versions: COPYING for GPL v2, COPYING3 for GPL v3.

Please note that Xpdf is NOT licensed under "any later version" of the GPL, as I have no idea what those versions will look like.

If you are redistributing unmodified copies of Xpdf (or any of the Xpdf tools) in binary form, you need to include all of the documentation: README, man pages (or help files), COPYING, and COPYING3.

If you want to incorporate the Xpdf source code into another program (or create a modified version of Xpdf), and you are distributing that program, you have two options: release your program under the GPL (v2 and/or v3), or purchase a commercial Xpdf source license.

If you're interested in commercial licensing, please see the Glyph & Cog web site:

http://www.glyphandcog.com/

Compatibility

Xpdf is developed and tested on Linux.

In addition, it has been compiled by others on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Digital Unix, Irix, and numerous other Unix implementations, as well as OS/2. It should work on pretty much any system which runs X11 and has Unix-like libraries. You'll need ANSI C++ and C compilers to compile it.

The non-X components of Xpdf (pdftops, pdftotext, pdfinfo, pdffonts, pdfdetach, pdftoppm, and pdfimages) can also be compiled on Windows and Mac OSX systems. See the Xpdf web page for details.

If you compile Xpdf for a system not listed on the web page, please let me know. If you're willing to make your binary available by ftp or on the web, I'll be happy to add a link from the Xpdf web page. I have decided not to host any binaries I didn't compile myself (for disk space and support reasons).

If you can't get Xpdf to compile on your system, send me email and I'll try to help.

Xpdf has been ported to the Acorn, Amiga, BeOS, and EPOC. See the Xpdf web page for links.

Getting Xpdf

The latest version is available from:

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

or:

ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/

Source code and several precompiled executables are available.

Announcements of new versions are posted to comp.text.pdf and emailed to a list of people. If you'd like to receive email notification of new versions, just let me know.

Running Xpdf

To run xpdf, simply type:

xpdf file.pdf

To generate a PostScript file, hit the "print" button in xpdf, or run pdftops:

pdftops file.pdf

To generate a plain text file, run pdftotext:

pdftotext file.pdf

There are five additional utilities (which are fully described in their man pages):

pdfinfo -- dumps a PDF file's Info dictionary (plus some other useful information) pdffonts -- lists the fonts used in a PDF file along with various information for each font pdfdetach -- lists or extracts embedded files (attachments) from a PDF file pdftoppm -- converts a PDF file to a series of PPM/PGM/PBM-format bitmaps pdfimages -- extracts the images from a PDF file

Command line options and many other details are described in the man pages: xpdf(1), etc.

All of these utilities read an optional configuration file: see the xpdfrc(5) man page.

Upgrading from Xpdf 3.02 (and earlier)

The font configuration system has been changed. Previous versions used mostly separate commands to configure fonts for display and for PostScript output. As of 3.03, configuration options that make sense for both display and PS output have been unified.

The following xpdfrc commands have been removed:

• displayFontT1, displayFontTT: replaced with fontFile
• displayNamedCIDFontT1, displayNamedCIDFontTT: replaced with fontFile
• displayCIDFontT1, displayCIDFontTT: replaced with fontFileCC
• psFont: replaced with psResidentFont
• psNamedFont16: replaced with psResidentFont16
• psFont16: replaced with psResidentFontCC

See the xpdfrc(5) man page for more information on the new commands.

Pdftops will now embed external 16-bit fonts (configured with the fontFileCC command) when the PDF file refers to a non-embedded font. It does not do any subsetting (yet), so the resulting PS files will be large.

Compiling Xpdf

See the separate file, INSTALL.

Bugs

If you find a bug in Xpdf, i.e., if it prints an error message, crashes, or incorrectly displays a document, and you don't see that bug listed here, please send me email, with a pointer (URL, ftp site, etc.) to the PDF file.

Third-Party Libraries

Xpdf uses the following libraries:

• FreeType [http://www.freetype.org/]
• libpng [http://www.libpng.com/pub/png/libpng.html] (used by pdftohtml)
• zlib [http://zlib.net/] (used by pdftohtml)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

• Patrick Voigt for help with the remote server code.
• Patrick Moreau, Martin P.J. Zinser, and David Mathog for the VMS port.
• David Boldt and Rick Rodgers for sample man pages.
• Brendan Miller for the icon idea.
• Olly Betts for help testing pdftotext.
• Peter Ganten for the OS/2 port.
• Michael Richmond for the Win32 port of pdftops and pdftotext and the xpdf/cygwin/XFree86 build instructions.
• Frank M. Siegert for improvements in the PostScript code.
• Leo Smiers for the decryption patches.
• Rainer Menzner for creating t1lib, and for helping me adapt it to xpdf.
• Pine Tree Systems A/S for funding the OPI and EPS support in pdftops.
• Easy Software Products for funding several improvements to the PostScript output code.
• Tom Kacvinsky for help with FreeType and for being my interface to the FreeType team.
• Theppitak Karoonboonyanan for help with Thai support.
• Leonard Rosenthol for help and contributions on a bunch of things.
• Alexandros Diamantidis and Maria Adaloglou for help with Greek support.
• Lawrence Lai for help with the CJK Unicode maps.

Various people have contributed modifications made for use by the pdftex project:

• Han The Thanh
• Martin Schröder of ArtCom GmbH

References

Adobe Systems Inc., PDF Reference, sixth edition: Adobe Portable Document Format version 1.7. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html [The manual for PDF version 1.7.]

Adobe Systems Inc., "Errata for the PDF Reference, sixth edition, version 1.7", October 16, 2006. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html [The errata for the PDF 1.7 spec.]

Adobe Systems Inc., PostScript Language Reference, 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley, 1999, ISBN 0-201-37922-8. [The official PostScript manual.]

Adobe Systems, Inc., The Type 42 Font Format Specification, Adobe Developer Support Technical Specification #5012. 1998. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5012.Type42_Spec.pdf [Type 42 is the format used to embed TrueType fonts in PostScript files.]

Adobe Systems, Inc., Adobe CMap and CIDFont Files Specification, Adobe Developer Support Technical Specification #5014. 1995. http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/PDFS/TN/5014.CIDFont_Spec.pdf [CMap file format needed for Japanese and Chinese font support.]

Adobe Systems, Inc., Adobe-Japan1-4 Character Collection for CID-Keyed Fonts, Adobe Developer Support Technical Note #5078. 2000. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5078.CID_Glyph.pdf [The Adobe Japanese character set.]

Adobe Systems, Inc., Adobe-GB1-4 Character Collection for CID-Keyed Fonts, Adobe Developer Support Technical Note #5079. 2000. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5079.Adobe-GB1-4.pdf [The Adobe Chinese GB (simplified) character set.]

Adobe Systems, Inc., Adobe-CNS1-3 Character Collection for CID-Keyed Fonts, Adobe Developer Support Technical Note #5080. 2000. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5080.CNS_CharColl.pdf [The Adobe Chinese CNS (traditional) character set.]

Adobe Systems Inc., Supporting the DCT Filters in PostScript Level 2, Adobe Developer Support Technical Note #5116. 1992. http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/PDFS/TN/5116.PS2_DCT.PDF [Description of the DCTDecode filter parameters.]

Adobe Systems Inc., Open Prepress Interface (OPI) Specification - Version 2.0, Adobe Developer Support Technical Note #5660. 2000. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/PDFS/TN/5660.OPI_2.0.pdf

Adobe Systems Inc., CMap files. ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/examples/nutshell/cjkv/adobe/ [The actual CMap files for the 16-bit CJK encodings.]

Adobe Systems Inc., Unicode glyph lists. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/unicodegn.html http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/glyphlist.txt http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/corporateuse.txt http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/zapfdingbats.txt [Mappings between character names to Unicode.]

Adobe Systems Inc., OpenType Specification v. 1.4. http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_spec.html [The OpenType font format spec.]

Aldus Corp., _OPI: Open