Pdf-tools

Jul 20, 2023

Emacs support library for PDF files

PDF Tools is, among other things, a replacement of Emacs’s DocView for PDF files. The key difference is that pages are not pre-rendered by e.g. ghostscript and stored in the file-system, but rather created on-demand and stored in memory. This rendering is performed by a special library named, for whatever reason, poppler, running inside a server program. This program is called epdfinfo and its job is to successively read requests from Emacs and produce the proper results, i.e. the PNG image of a PDF page.

Actually, displaying PDF files is just one part of PDF Tools. Since poppler can provide us with all kinds of information about a document and is also able to modify it, there is a lot more we can do with it.



Checkout these related ports:
  • Yatex - Yet Another LaTeX mode and html mode on Emacs
  • Xtexsh - Tcl/Tk-based simple TeX interface
  • Xreader - Multi-format document reader
  • Xpp - X11-based printer manager for CUPS
  • Xpdfopen - Command line utility for PDF viewers
  • Xmbibtex - Reference manager based on the BibTeX file format
  • Xfce4-print - Print system support for the Xfce Desktop
  • Utopia - Adobe Utopia typeface for Groff
  • Typetools - Tools for manipulating fonts
  • Txtbdf2ps - Translator TXT + BDF to PS
  • Ttfquery - FontTools-based package for querying system fonts
  • Ttfautohint - Automatic font hinting library
  • Ttf2pt1 - True Type Font to Postscript Type 1 Converter
  • Trueprint - Print program listings on postscript printer
  • Transfig - Tools to convert Xfig .fig files