Looking for a PDF viewer

2018-12-06T15:04:57Z

I've been investigating Open Source C/C++ PDF viewers/rendering libraries. There really isn't a lot available out there. Most projects use poppler. It was developed as a fork of xpdf and is supposed to be somewhat more efficient than it. Both are licensed under GPL. The only other real competitor is mupdf. There have been some comparisons done on efficiency between mupdf and poppler and mupdf seems to be the clear winner. Just running mupdf versus a poppler based PDF viewer on a very large PDF file being viewed on a slow computer gives a good idea of the differences between the two. Mupdf was originally licensed under a GPL license and is now using AGPL which is even more restrictive. There are also commercial licenses available for poppler and mupdf which companies hope that projects will use if the GPL and AGPL licenses are too limiting. Projects would need to make all of their source code freely available if they want to include either of these libraries and don't want to purchase a commercial license. With AGPL, the source code needs to be available even if the program is not distributed, but it is used by someone over a network.

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Looking for a PDF viewer