- published: 06 Jun 2015
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In computing, Poppler (or libpoppler) is a free software library used to render PDF documents. It is the most common such library on GNU/Linux systems, and is used by the PDF viewers of the open source GNOME and KDE desktop environments. Its development is supported by freedesktop.org.
The project was started by Kristian Høgsberg with two goals in mind:
As of the version 0.18 release in 2011, the poppler library represents a complete implementation of ISO 32000-1, the PDF format standard, and is the first major free PDF library to support its forms and annotations features.
Poppler itself is a fork of the Xpdf-3.0 PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph and Cog, LLC.
The name "Poppler" comes from the animated series Futurama episode The Problem with Popplers.
A number of free software applications use Poppler to render PDF documents
Poppler can use two back-ends for drawing PDF documents, Cairo and Splash. Its features may depend on which back-end it employs. A third back-end based on Qt4's painting framework "Arthur", is available, but is incomplete and no longer under active development. Bindings exist for Glib, Qt3, and Qt4, that provide interfaces to the Poppler backends, although the Qt3 and Qt4 bindings support only the Splash backend. There is a patchset available to add support for the Cairo backend to the Qt4 bindings, but the Poppler project does not currently wish to integrate the feature into the library proper.
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of the computer for some purposes. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms and its documentation concerned with the operation of a data processing system. Program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware or by serving as input to another piece of software. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware (meaning physical devices). In contrast to hardware, software "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more narrow sense, meaning application software only. Sometimes the term includes data that has not traditionally been associated with computers, such as film, tapes, and records.