Package: xpdf-utils Version: 3.02-12 Severity: grave xpdf as a rendering library was removed from Debian, with the justification that a fork of this library, poppler, could be used instead.
However, the command-line utilities in poppler-utils are significantly different than those of xpdf and are in no way a drop-in replacement. For example, in pdftotext: xpdf does better with ligatures, and with ordering of text in tables; the two behave differently w.r.t. PDF crop boxes. In general, the output of the tools from the two packages are completely different, so programs that parse their output cannot easily be ported from one to the other. Xpdf-utils are also much easier to use for cross-platform applications due to the availability of pre-compiled binaries for other platforms. The change to poppler for rendering seems to have inadvertently caused xpdf-utils to disappear completely from Debian. Xpdf is one of the classic examples of a quality well-supported free software project. It is a grave oversight for it to be removed completely from Debian. Unfortunately, the poppler fork chose the exact same names for its incompatible command-line executables as the names used by xpdf. That does require some care to avoid conflicts. In MacPorts, that issue was solved simply by renaming the executables in xpdf-utils: pdftops => xpdf-pdftops, etc. See: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17540 Thanks, Yitz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
