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Building Xpdf on Ubuntu

By Jon Jensen
August 31, 2011

It may happen that you need to use Xpdf, even though it no longer ships with Ubuntu and is considered … outdated? buggy? insecure? In any case, it still renders some PDFs that Poppler-based viewers such as Evince don’t, or allows some troublesome PDFs to print as fonts and line art instead of a rasterized mess.

Here’s how I built and installed xpdf 3.02 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) x86_64:

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libmotif-dev
wget ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02.tar.gz  # now 3.03 is current
tar xzpf xpdf-3.02.tar.gz
cd xpdf-3.02
./configure --with-freetype2-library=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu \
    --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2 \
    --with-Xm-library=/usr/lib \
    --with-Xm-includes=/usr/include/Xm
make
# see lots of warnings!
sudo make install

That’s it. Not as nice as the old native Debian/Ubuntu packages, but gets the job done.

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