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It seems that most GNU/Linux PDF readers use poppler for rendering.

For testing purposes I would like not to use poppler. Are there any (recent) alternatives ?

xpdf doesn't count, since I expect both to share large pieces of code.

Skippy le Grand Gourou
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  • You might try the online viewers, like [pdfescape](http://www.pdfescape.com/) (limited size), or a Windows viewer under wine like [foxit](https://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/pdf-reader/) (which seems to now have a Linux version). Chrome has a built-in viewer too. – meuh Oct 11 '16 at 16:15

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Mupdf for example is not based on poppler.

dirkt
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    MuPDF is based on GhostScript. Poppler is the successor on Xpdf, which is also based on GhostScript. Welcome to the Brave New World, where an Adobe format invented in 1990's for marketing reasons is an ISO standard, and its description takes 1200 pages. – Satō Katsura Oct 11 '16 at 15:38
  • @SatoKatsura Well, PDF is based on PostScript, so it makes sense to base a PDF reader on an existing PostScript implementation ... (is there any other open source one besides GhostScript?) – dirkt Oct 11 '16 at 15:52
  • Not that I know of, and I don't expect any new one to pop up any time soon, simply because of the complexity of the format. Something similar can also be observed for commercial implementations, where everybody licenses code from Adobe. About a year ago there was a bug in Acrobat reader for mobiles, and just about all other mobile PDF readers were also affected. FWIW, the first versions of PDF were just PostScript with checksums. – Satō Katsura Oct 11 '16 at 16:01