The idea for this project is twofold:
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to fix some of the bugs present in the current xpdf that are not, unfortunately, fixed yet (alas, if they had, this would not need to exist at all).
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to be conservative, while including a hand-picked amount of features, like extended and more fine-grained zooming so that I can actually see my PDF files without having too many problems with my eyes.
A more detailed discussion of the things that motivated this initiative can be seen on my original post.
You are welcome to see other places than the master branch: if you
want a very basic, semi-broken packaging for Debian, see the debian
branch. A rough approximation of the content of the original source by
Martin Pitt is present at original.
When I started this project, I did not know that some people from Gentoo had taken the changes by Martin and continued keeping up with the newer versions of poppler and that Michael Gilbert had picked up those changes to include in Debian.
As a result, I restarted almost all the work (with some twists) on top of the pristine xpdf 3.02 sources, and started to strip things down, by removing everything that wasn't of use anymore. Those sources are present at original-plus-xpdf-3.02.
It should be noted that the latter 4 patchlevels released by the original author of xpdf are not relevant to the present program, since those changes modify things that are not here anymore. OK. That covers the basic information about some of the security updates.
The code presents many opportunities for experimentation and learning with refactoring, since it has very large classes/functions, a lot of variables in some functions, code that can be replaced with things that are part of the standard library etc. It also lacks some const correctness and has more casts than what would be desired.
Any contributions are welcome and will be sincerely considered, especially if they help to improve the source code readability.
Rogério Brito
