Poppler

A PDF rendering library.

Poppler is a PDF rendering library forked from the original xpdf codebase in 2005, with the goal of producing a single shared library that GNOME and KDE applications could use rather than each project rebuilding xpdf into its own dependency. The library handles parsing, decompression, font handling, and rendering of PDFs through Cairo or Splash output backends.

Poppler is the engine behind GNOME Evince, KDE Okular, and many command-line utilities (pdftotext, pdftoppm, pdfinfo, pdftohtml). The poppler-utils package, in particular, is the standard toolkit for shell-pipeline PDF processing on Linux.

The project is well-maintained under GNOME's stewardship and follows a regular release cadence. Most desktop Linux PDF viewing on free-software stacks ultimately routes through Poppler in some form, which has motivated continuing investment in performance, font fallback, and accessibility features.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

Category: Office

Website: https://poppler.freedesktop.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install poppler-utils
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install poppler-utils
Arch:          sudo pacman -S poppler
macOS:         brew install poppler

Authors

Poppler maintainers

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