Is XPDF an alternative of poppler tools?

[zuphilip]

See also https://github.com/zotero/cross-xpdf

[kba]

poppler started as a fork of XPDF, is part of freedesktop and is frequently updated, so I see no reason why the XPDF implementation of pdftotext or pdfinfo would be superior.

[zuphilip]

Thank you @kba for the explanation. But then both might work the same for a user, right?

I was just thinking to mention somewhere that instead of poppler also xpdf could be used. It is an prerequisite, i.e. not our main focus, so 2-3 words in the README could enough.

[kba]

Yes, both will work but at least on my Ubuntu 18.04 machine, the xpdf package does not include the tools, you need to download/install them from https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html or build them yourself. poppler-utils contains the tools.