Xpdf is the major competitor to the use of ADE on eBook Readers.

[edit] Overview

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities.

Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, Linux, VMS, and OS/2. The non-X components (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Win32 (Windows) systems and should run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler. It does not support DRM.

Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient. It can use Type 1, TrueType, or standard X fonts. Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2

[edit] Windows version

The XpdfViewer® library provides a PDF file viewer component for use in Windows applications. XpdfViewer enables any Windows developer to add PDF viewing capability to their application. It provides the developer with full control over the PDF viewer. This is a DLL for commercial use.

XpdfViewer features include:

• support for PDF hyperlinks
• text extraction
• text find
• region highlighting, including the ability to read highlight files generated by search engines
• printing
• CJK support - CJK fonts available for licensing

[edit] For more information

• http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/index.html
• http://www.glyphandcog.com/ for commercial licensing.
• http://poppler.freedesktop.org/ Poppler is a rendering library based on XPDF. It is used in Evince to provide PDF support.