#+TITLE: PDF Tools README #+AUTHOR: Andreas Politz #+EMAIL: politza@fh-trier.de [[http://melpa.org/#/pdf-tools][http://melpa.org/packages/pdf-tools-badge.svg]] [[https://travis-ci.org/politza/pdf-tools.svg?branch%3Dmaster][https://travis-ci.org/politza/pdf-tools.svg?branch=master]] ** About this package PDF Tools is, among other things, a replacement of DocView for PDF files. The key difference is, that pages are not prerendered by e.g. ghostscript and stored in the file-system, but rather created on-demand and stored in memory. This rendering is performed by a special library named, for whatever reason, poppler, running inside a server programm. This programm is called ~epdfinfo~ and it's job is it to successively read requests from Emacs and produce the proper results, i.e. the PNG image of a PDF page. Actually, displaying PDF files is just one part of PDF Tools. Since poppler can provide us with all kinds of informations about a document and is also able to modify it, there is a lot more we can do with it. [[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2bc1is_pdf-tools-tourdeforce_tech?forcedQuality%3Dhd720][Watch]] ** Features *** View View PDF documents in a buffer with DocView-like bindings. *** Isearch Interactively search PDF documents like any other buffer, either for a string or a PCRE. *** Occur List lines matching a string or regexp in one or more PDF documents. *** Follow links Click on highlighted links, moving to some part of a different page, some external file, a website or any other URI. Links may also be followed by keyboard commands. *** Annotations Display and list text and markup annotations (like underline), edit their contents and attributes (e.g. color), move them around, delete them or create new ones and then save the modifications back to the PDF file. *** Attachments Save files attached to the PDF-file or list them in a dired buffer. *** Outline Use imenu or a special buffer to examine and navigate the PDF's outline. *** SyncTeX Jump from a position on a page directly to the TeX source and vice-versa. *** Misc + Display PDF's metadata. + Mark a region and kill the text from the PDF. + Keep track of visited pages via a history. ** Installation The package may be installed via melpa and it will try to build the server part when it is actiated the first time, though next section is still relevant. *** Server Prerequisites You'll need GNU Emacs \ge 24.3 and some form of a GNU/Linux OS. Other operating systems are currently not supported (patches welcome). The following instructions assume a Debian-based system. (The prerequisites may be installed automatically on this kind of systems, see [[Compilation]] .) First make shure a suitable build-system is installed. We need at least a C/C++ compiler (both ~gcc~ and ~g++~), ~make~, ~automake~ and ~autoconf~. Next we need to install a few libraries PDF Tools depends on, some of which are probably already on your system. #+begin_src sh $ sudo aptitude install libpng-dev libz-dev $ sudo aptitude install libpoppler-glib-dev $ sudo aptitude install libpoppler-private-dev #+end_src On some older Ubuntu systems, the final command will possibly give an error. This should be no problem, since in some versions this package was contained in the main package ~libpoppler-dev~. Debian wheezy comes with libpoppler version 0.18, which is pretty old. The minimally required version is 0.16, but some features of PDF Tools depend on a more recent version of this library. See the following table for what they are and what version they require. | You want to ... | Required version | |-------------------------------------------+------------------| | ... create and modify text annotations. | \ge 0.19.4 | | ... search case-sensitive. | \ge 0.22 | | ... create and modify markup annotations. | \ge 0.26 | |-------------------------------------------+------------------| In case you decide to install libpoppler from source, make shure to run it's configure script with the ~--enable-xpdf-headers~ option. Finally there is one feature (following links of a PDF document by plain keystrokes) which requires imagemagick's convert utility. This requirement is optional and you may install it like so: #+begin_src sh $ sudo aptitude install imagemagick #+end_src **** Compiling on OS X Although OS X is not officially supported, it has been reported to have been successfully compiled. You will need to install poppler which you can get with homebrew via #+BEGIN_SRC sh $ brew install poppler #+END_SRC You will also have to help ~pkg-config~ find some libraries by setting ~PKG_CONFIG_PATH~, e.g. #+BEGIN_SRC sh $ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/zlib/1.2.8/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig #+END_SRC or likewise within Emacs using `setenv`. After that, compilation should proceed as normal. *** Compilation Now it's time to compile the source. #+begin_src sh $ cd /path/to/pdf-tools $ make install-server-deps # optional $ make -s #+end_src The ~make install-server-deps~ command will try to install all nescessary programms and libraries to build the package, though it'll only work, if ~sudo~ and ~apt-get~ are available. This should compile the source code and create a Emacs Lisp Package in the root directory of the project. The configure script also tells you at the very end, which features, depending on the libpoppler version, will be available. These commands should give no error, otherwise you are in trouble. *** Installing If ~make~ produced the ELP file ~pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar~ you are fine. This package contains all the nescessary files for Emacs and may be installed by either using #+begin_src sh $ make install-package #+end_src or executing the Emacs command #+begin_src elisp M-x package-install-file RET pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar RET #+end_src To complete the installation process, you need to activate the package by putting #+begin_src elisp (pdf-tools-install) #+end_src somewhere in your ~.emacs~. Next you probably want to take a look at the various features of what you've just installed. The following two commands might be of help for doing so. #+begin_src elisp M-x pdf-tools-help RET M-x pdf-tools-customize RET #+end_src *** Updating Some day you might want to update this package via ~git pull~ and then reinstall it. Sometimes this may fail, especially if Lisp-Macros are involved and the version hasn't changed. To avoid this kind of problems, you should delete the old package via ~list-packages~, restart Emacs and then reinstall the package. This also applies when updating via package and melpa. # Local Variables: # mode: org # End: