Poppler is a fork of the xpdf PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of
Glyph and Cog, LLC. There are two reasons for forking xpdf. First, to
provide PDF rendering functionality as a shared library to centralize
the maintenence effort. Today a number of applications incorporate the
xpdf code base and whenever a security issue is discovered, all these
applications exchange patches and put out new releases. In turn, all
distributions must package and release new versions of these xpdf based
viewers. Due to this, there is a lot of duplicated effort. Even if
poppler in the short term introduces yet another xpdf-derived code base
to the world, hopefully, over time these applications will adopt
poppler. After all, only one application needs to use poppler to break
even.

Second, libpoppler intends to move forward in a number of areas that do
not fit within the goals of xpdf. By design, xpdf depends on very few
libraries and runs on a wide range of X-based platforms. This is a
strong feature and reasonable design goal. However, poppler intends to
replace parts of xpdf that are now available as standard components of
modern Unix desktop environments. One such example is fontconfig,
which solves the problem of matching and locating fonts on the system
in a standardized and well understood way. Another example is cairo,
which provides high quality 2D rendering. See the file TODO for a list
of planned changes.