10 ms·

Xpdf

100 points by app4soft 6y ago

coderintherye 6y ago
xpdf has a great feature for transforming a pdf to text, pdftotext, which you can pass the -table option in order to get tabular/csv style data.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  That's now either part of poppler-utils or also provided through poppler-utils. On my Debian box, the manpage still references Xpdf, though pdftotext is provided by poppler-utils. That said, yes, it's quite handy.
badsectoracula 6y ago
Xpdf was nice, but at some point they switched (or the project was forked without getting a new name, not sure) to Qt from Motif and basically lost all appeal for me - the main reason i installed it was exactly because of the lightweight GUI.
- p_l 6y ago
  Not only it got less lightweight, I have just looked at how it looks now and ... wow, did it get ugly. I have a lot of nostalgia for Xpdf, but I guess these days it's been successfully replaced by Zathura.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    I've checked out Zathura, but TBH i do want a GUI :-P.
callesgg 6y ago
PDF.js has solved most of my pdf needs. It is like the VLC of pdf. Just sort of works.
- axiolite 6y ago
  PDF.js is a nightmare. Horribly slow to load large documents, slow to scroll or search, and utterly fails in the bigges thing PDF has going for it... PDF.js often doesn't display or print out the PDF like the original (cutting off parts, failing to rotate properly, etc). You might as well say Notepad or VI "just work" as HTML viewers.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Yeah, it's weird that Firefox sends a poorly rendered bitmap to print PDF. Does that happen on all operating systems? With all printer drivers?
    - SigmundA 6y ago
      It renders to canvas to draw the pdf so all it has is a bitmap, hence the bitmap printing. To get decent quality with bitmap printing you have to do really high res which eats memory and is slow. They were working on an SVG renderer to support proper vector printing still don’t think its done. They should have used SVG to begin with. I actually like the idea of pdf.js, having a pure browser based pdf viewer is a good thing, really needs good vector print support though to be serious.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        Don't a lot of printer drivers pretty much support pdf though?
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Only the Laser class ones, and definitely not the cheapest models.
        SigmundA 6y ago
        The browser has no way to send anything directly to the printer through javascript and probably not the best idea to let it either from a security perspective, especially PDF's. It's up to the browser to render the page to the printer, if it contains canvases they are sent as bitmaps, since thats what they are. HTML elements and SVG are generally rendered as vector commands to the printer which might end up being postscript or pdf. So svg's are much lighter going to printer then high dpi canvases. They also looks much better too since the printer renders them to the final raster at native res say 600 dpi. Other browsers use a native PDF renders that can do whatever it wants, not sure what PDFium does in Chrome/Edge maybe it just sends the PDF if it can determine the printer supports it, otherwise it does native print commands for sure, it does not send bitmaps. The nice thing about pdf.js is it runs on platforms that have no pdf viewer built in but have a web browser or maybe a buggy built in one. You can also style and control it yourself and add features to it for your app making for tighter embedding. Also it can be updated independently of browser.
molesy 6y ago
Edit: xspdf.com is the evil site I mentioned earlier, not xpdfreader. Xpdf tools have been a lifesaver for ages. Thank you Derek et all!
notaplumber 6y ago
Xpdf has a history of enforcing purely software DRM on PDFs for no logical reason, such as the disabling of copying text and printing from documents. The upstream was against OS distributions patching this silly DRM out. I don't know if the upstream ever changed their policy on this, but there are better PDF readers out there now. Here's a very long, and entertaining thread about it on the OpenBSD mailing lists from 2008. https://marc.info/?t=120906296700004&r=2&w=2 https://marc.info/?t=120906296700004&r=2&w=2 No longer on their website, but original author considered this to be "cracking". https://web.archive.org/web/20161129092715/http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161129092715/http://www.foolab...
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  He seems to confuse the idea with a legal duty and a moral one as well as failing to understand where his own responsibility lies in the grand scheme of things. Even if there existed a highly questionable moral duty not to say copy and paste a quote from a document its hard to understand ethically why he imagines that he owes the author the duty to enforce this personally convincing others not to patch such a "feature" out. He sounds like a highly detestable human being.
  - donw 6y ago
    > He sounds like a highly detestable human being. That is over-the-top harsh. I disagree with the choices the author of XPDF made. I would have made different ones. Neither of us fully understands his mental state, or why he made those choices. So let's focus our criticism on the choices themselves, rather than outright dehumanizing another person for making a technical decision.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  What's bad about respecting the requests of the publisher of the file? (which is another way to describe the flags)
  - notaplumber 6y ago
jlturner 6y ago
I use xpdf on my camping laptop. I like it’s minimalist interface and have gone through quite a number of programming books with it. That being said, it’s certainly not the best pdf viewer, but it gets the job done and is lightweight.
- pfarrell 6y ago
  I must admit, the phrase “camping laptop” really caught my eyes. In my view, they are antithetical. But, to each his/her own!
michaelmrose 6y ago
I would suggest Zathura. It is minimal fast themeable, has configurable bindings and vim like bindings out of the box. It has marks and a binding to jump to marks that is similar in nature to vim marks and remembers your place in documents. With the mupdf backend it also supports epub save for an bug in how it treats the table of contents which presently afflicts 0.4.7 which has already been fixed which will presumably be fixed in 0.4.8. Come on guys cut another release!
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Seconded, zathura is awesomesauce. Another reason to use it is seccomp mode. Zathura puts itself in a seccomp jail before reading the input document. Inside the jail all it can do is read from the input file and read/write to the display (in my case, Wayland socket -- on X11 this isn't quite as effective). Just wish it had nonrectangular (i.e. paragraph-flow) select-and-copy, but I know PDF makes that as difficult as possible. Works great on touchscreens except that the pinch gesture is misinterpreted as select instead of zoom. Tip: press tab while viewing a document to see the outline (which you can navigate with vi keystrokes!). Took me a while to discover that.
vzaliva 6y ago
I've stopped using xpdf years ago. It was OK, but got obsolette compared to other readers, like Evince.
fsflover 6y ago
More FLOSS PDF readers: https://pdfreaders.org/ https://pdfreaders.org/.
- bla3 6y ago
  No poppler, no pdfium. It's missing some popular choices.
  - benibela 6y ago
    No texstudio (although that uses poppler)
  - ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
    Poppler is a library, not a reader.
  - creata 6y ago
    I think poppler is a library, not an application. Anyway, it's one of the two PDF backends for Zathura (the other being MuPDF) so it's at least included indirectly.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
I liked xpdf, but stopped using it after my package manager said it had unpatched CVEs (and at least implied unmaintained). Any chance it's been cleaned up now? I see a recent release but couldn't find a change log.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  For something like PDF, I wonder how practical it would be to write a program that just strips out “dangerous” features. Maybe this wouldn’t help with buffer overflows and similar, but it might be useful. Maybe just roundtripping your pdf through djvu or postscript would be sufficient?
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > or postscript Ghostscript is written in C and doesn't have a great reputation for security.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The point is to make the document safe: if you’re concerned about the security of Ghostscript, run it in a quarantined VM or similar.
      - tedunangst 6y ago
        Why would you trust a compromised Ghostscript to produce a safe pdf?
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        Because the likelihood that I get a PDF designed to exploit a bug in XPDF (or other image viewer) after being converted to PS and back by Ghostscript is relatively low (e.g. this would seem to indicate that I'm being targetted personally, or I have a common setup)? But, in general, I'm not saying "use ghostscript", I'm saying "perhaps roundtripping incoming PDFs through some other file format will produce a PDF that is safer to view than viewing untrusted PDFs directly"

100 points by app4soft 6y ago

xpdf has a great feature for transforming a pdf to text, pdftotext, which you can pass the -table option in order to get tabular/csv style data.

dredmorbius 6y ago
That's now either part of poppler-utils or also provided through poppler-utils. On my Debian box, the manpage still references Xpdf, though pdftotext is provided by poppler-utils. That said, yes, it's quite handy.

badsectoracula 6y ago

Xpdf was nice, but at some point they switched (or the project was forked without getting a new name, not sure) to Qt from Motif and basically lost all appeal for me - the main reason i installed it was exactly because of the lightweight GUI.

p_l 6y ago
Not only it got less lightweight, I have just looked at how it looks now and ... wow, did it get ugly. I have a lot of nostalgia for Xpdf, but I guess these days it's been successfully replaced by Zathura.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  I've checked out Zathura, but TBH i do want a GUI :-P.

callesgg 6y ago

PDF.js has solved most of my pdf needs. It is like the VLC of pdf. Just sort of works.

axiolite 6y ago
PDF.js is a nightmare. Horribly slow to load large documents, slow to scroll or search, and utterly fails in the bigges thing PDF has going for it... PDF.js often doesn't display or print out the PDF like the original (cutting off parts, failing to rotate properly, etc). You might as well say Notepad or VI "just work" as HTML viewers.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Yeah, it's weird that Firefox sends a poorly rendered bitmap to print PDF. Does that happen on all operating systems? With all printer drivers?
  - SigmundA 6y ago
    It renders to canvas to draw the pdf so all it has is a bitmap, hence the bitmap printing. To get decent quality with bitmap printing you have to do really high res which eats memory and is slow. They were working on an SVG renderer to support proper vector printing still don’t think its done. They should have used SVG to begin with. I actually like the idea of pdf.js, having a pure browser based pdf viewer is a good thing, really needs good vector print support though to be serious.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Don't a lot of printer drivers pretty much support pdf though?
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Only the Laser class ones, and definitely not the cheapest models.
      - SigmundA 6y ago
        The browser has no way to send anything directly to the printer through javascript and probably not the best idea to let it either from a security perspective, especially PDF's. It's up to the browser to render the page to the printer, if it contains canvases they are sent as bitmaps, since thats what they are. HTML elements and SVG are generally rendered as vector commands to the printer which might end up being postscript or pdf. So svg's are much lighter going to printer then high dpi canvases. They also looks much better too since the printer renders them to the final raster at native res say 600 dpi. Other browsers use a native PDF renders that can do whatever it wants, not sure what PDFium does in Chrome/Edge maybe it just sends the PDF if it can determine the printer supports it, otherwise it does native print commands for sure, it does not send bitmaps. The nice thing about pdf.js is it runs on platforms that have no pdf viewer built in but have a web browser or maybe a buggy built in one. You can also style and control it yourself and add features to it for your app making for tighter embedding. Also it can be updated independently of browser.

molesy 6y ago

Edit: xspdf.com is the evil site I mentioned earlier, not xpdfreader. Xpdf tools have been a lifesaver for ages. Thank you Derek et all!

notaplumber 6y ago

Xpdf has a history of enforcing purely software DRM on PDFs for no logical reason, such as the disabling of copying text and printing from documents. The upstream was against OS distributions patching this silly DRM out. I don't know if the upstream ever changed their policy on this, but there are better PDF readers out there now. Here's a very long, and entertaining thread about it on the OpenBSD mailing lists from 2008. https://marc.info/?t=120906296700004&r=2&w=2 https://marc.info/?t=120906296700004&r=2&w=2 No longer on their website, but original author considered this to be "cracking". https://web.archive.org/web/20161129092715/http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161129092715/http://www.foolab...

michaelmrose 6y ago
He seems to confuse the idea with a legal duty and a moral one as well as failing to understand where his own responsibility lies in the grand scheme of things. Even if there existed a highly questionable moral duty not to say copy and paste a quote from a document its hard to understand ethically why he imagines that he owes the author the duty to enforce this personally convincing others not to patch such a "feature" out. He sounds like a highly detestable human being.
- donw 6y ago
  > He sounds like a highly detestable human being. That is over-the-top harsh. I disagree with the choices the author of XPDF made. I would have made different ones. Neither of us fully understands his mental state, or why he made those choices. So let's focus our criticism on the choices themselves, rather than outright dehumanizing another person for making a technical decision.
maxerickson 6y ago
What's bad about respecting the requests of the publisher of the file? (which is another way to describe the flags)
- notaplumber 6y ago

jlturner 6y ago

I use xpdf on my camping laptop. I like it’s minimalist interface and have gone through quite a number of programming books with it. That being said, it’s certainly not the best pdf viewer, but it gets the job done and is lightweight.

pfarrell 6y ago
I must admit, the phrase “camping laptop” really caught my eyes. In my view, they are antithetical. But, to each his/her own!

michaelmrose 6y ago

I would suggest Zathura. It is minimal fast themeable, has configurable bindings and vim like bindings out of the box. It has marks and a binding to jump to marks that is similar in nature to vim marks and remembers your place in documents. With the mupdf backend it also supports epub save for an bug in how it treats the table of contents which presently afflicts 0.4.7 which has already been fixed which will presumably be fixed in 0.4.8. Come on guys cut another release!

KirillPanov 6y ago
Seconded, zathura is awesomesauce. Another reason to use it is seccomp mode. Zathura puts itself in a seccomp jail before reading the input document. Inside the jail all it can do is read from the input file and read/write to the display (in my case, Wayland socket -- on X11 this isn't quite as effective). Just wish it had nonrectangular (i.e. paragraph-flow) select-and-copy, but I know PDF makes that as difficult as possible. Works great on touchscreens except that the pinch gesture is misinterpreted as select instead of zoom. Tip: press tab while viewing a document to see the outline (which you can navigate with vi keystrokes!). Took me a while to discover that.

vzaliva 6y ago

I've stopped using xpdf years ago. It was OK, but got obsolette compared to other readers, like Evince.

fsflover 6y ago

More FLOSS PDF readers: https://pdfreaders.org/ https://pdfreaders.org/.

bla3 6y ago
No poppler, no pdfium. It's missing some popular choices.
- benibela 6y ago
  No texstudio (although that uses poppler)
- ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
  Poppler is a library, not a reader.
- creata 6y ago
  I think poppler is a library, not an application. Anyway, it's one of the two PDF backends for Zathura (the other being MuPDF) so it's at least included indirectly.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

I liked xpdf, but stopped using it after my package manager said it had unpatched CVEs (and at least implied unmaintained). Any chance it's been cleaned up now? I see a recent release but couldn't find a change log.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
For something like PDF, I wonder how practical it would be to write a program that just strips out “dangerous” features. Maybe this wouldn’t help with buffer overflows and similar, but it might be useful. Maybe just roundtripping your pdf through djvu or postscript would be sufficient?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > or postscript Ghostscript is written in C and doesn't have a great reputation for security.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    The point is to make the document safe: if you’re concerned about the security of Ghostscript, run it in a quarantined VM or similar.
    - tedunangst 6y ago
      Why would you trust a compromised Ghostscript to produce a safe pdf?
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        Because the likelihood that I get a PDF designed to exploit a bug in XPDF (or other image viewer) after being converted to PS and back by Ghostscript is relatively low (e.g. this would seem to indicate that I'm being targetted personally, or I have a common setup)? But, in general, I'm not saying "use ghostscript", I'm saying "perhaps roundtripping incoming PDFs through some other file format will produce a PDF that is safer to view than viewing untrusted PDFs directly"