Ubuntu Touch: Poppler or MuPDF as PDF renderer

[Albert Astals Cid]

On Friday 17 May 2013 15:40:56 Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Hi,

Hi

> during my thoughts about the printing stack for Ubuntu Touch [1] I came
> to the conclusion that printing needs a PDF renderer to turn incoming
> PDF into the printer's language (PWG Raster, PostScript, PCL, ...) but a
> PDF renderer needs already to be on a mobile device to make it able to
> display PDF files on the screen.
> 
> The Ubuntu desktop uses Poppler for screen display and Ghostscript for
> printing. On a mobile device this is overkill. We need only one PDF
> renderer and also no PostScript interpreter as for printing we expect
> all apps to send PDF.
> 
> So Ghostscript is out of the question here as it is large and the PDF
> interpreter is written in PostScript. Poppler has the advantage of
> having a long history and so it should deal best with quirky files.
> MuPDF is written with lightweightness in mind, is the only free software
> which allows filling and saving PDF forms, 

Poppler supports filling and saving forms since a long time.

Cheers,
  Albert

> and is written by the
> Ghostscript developers who are experts on the field of printing.
> 
> So I want to call for testing the two (Poppler, MuPDF) and for discussion.
> 
> We have also a Blueprint [2] and a Wiki page [3].
> 
>    Till
> 
> [1]https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/client-1305-printing-stack-> with-mobile-in-mind
> [2]https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/client-1305-pdf-renderer-f
> or-ubuntu-touch [3]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/PDFRenderer