Poppler is a fork of the xpdf PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph and Cog, LLC.
Poppler provides PDF rendering functionality as a shared library, to centralize the maintenence effort.
By design, xpdf depends on very few libraries. This is a strong feature and reasonable design goal. However, with poppler we would like to replace parts of xpdf that are now available as standard components of modern Unix desktop environments.
