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17.10 pdf-tools

“Emacs support library for PDF files.”

• GitHub Source
• Article, More, Even More

PDF Tools is, among other things, a replacement of DocView for PDF files. The key difference is that pages are not pre-rendered 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 program. This program is called epdfinfo and its job is 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 information about a document and is also able to modify it, there is a lot more we can do with it.

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
  • 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.
• Virtual
  • Use a collection of documents as if it were one, big single PDF.
• Misc
  • Display PDF’s metadata.
  • Mark a region and kill the text from the PDF.
  • Keep track of visited pages via a history.
  • Apply a color filter for reading in low light conditions.