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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Building Xpdf on Ubuntu

    Jon Jensen

    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    It may happen that you need to use Xpdf, even though it no longer ships with Ubuntu and is considered … outdated?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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