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 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. Watch
View PDF documents in a buffer with DocView-like bindings.
Interactively search PDF documents like any other buffer, either for a string or a PCRE.
List lines matching a string or regexp in one or more PDF documents.
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.
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.
Save files attached to the PDF-file or list them in a dired buffer.
Use imenu or a special buffer to examine and navigate the PDF’s outline.
Jump from a position on a page directly to the TeX source and vice versa.
Use a collection of documents as if it where one, big single PDF.
- 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.
The package may be installed via melpa and it will try to build the server part when it is activated the first time, though the next section is still relevant.
You’ll need GNU Emacs ≥ 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 sure 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.
$ sudo aptitude install libpng-dev libz-dev
$ sudo aptitude install libpoppler-glib-dev
$ sudo aptitude install libpoppler-private-dev 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. | ≥ 0.19.4 |
| … search case-sensitive. | ≥ 0.22 |
| … create and modify markup annotations. | ≥ 0.26 |
In case you decide to install libpoppler from source, make sure
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:
$ sudo aptitude install imagemagickAlthough 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
$ brew install popplerYou will also have to help pkg-config find some libraries by
setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH, e.g.
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/zlib/1.2.8/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfigor likewise within Emacs using `setenv`.
After that, compilation should proceed as normal.
Now it’s time to compile the source.
$ cd /path/to/pdf-tools
$ make install-server-deps # optional
$ make -sThe make install-server-deps command will try to install all
necessary programs 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.
If make produced the ELP file pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar you are
fine. This package contains all the necessary files for Emacs
and may be installed by either using
$ make install-packageor executing the Emacs command
M-x package-install-file RET pdf-tools-${VERSION}.tar RETTo complete the installation process, you need to activate the package by putting
(pdf-tools-install)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.
M-x pdf-tools-help RET
M-x pdf-tools-customize RETSome 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.