[Feature] poppler in order to view PDFs

[mantielero]

Hi Stefan, Have you considered adding poppler in order to view PDF's?

Regards, José

[StefanSalewski]

Can you tell us for what you would need that?

We hesitate to add too much stuff that nobody uses and nobody tested. We have added VTE and gstreamer support because someone asked for it already. The initial guy who asked for VTE vanished soon, same for gstreamer, so gstreamer is nearly untested still. And indeed we expected that -- for what can VTE and gstreamer be used successfully? And poppler? Do you seriously intend to write a high quality PDF reader?

Well, we will see if we can add it...

[mantielero]

I would like to try to use it to view scanned documents. Probably it doesn't worth to add it at this stage. For that use case I can simply get the images from the PDFs with a separated tool.

Cheers

[StefanSalewski]

Note that poppler is for PDF, while a scanned document is at first a bitmap graphic only. Of course PDF can contain bitmaps graphics, but that is only a low quality fallback. For a scanned graphic one would try to apply character recognition or vector reconstruction, so that one have true text and vector graphics. Then one would try to generate program code that arrange the text and the vectors graphics in a way that match the original document. That all is a very complicated process.