pdf files not loaded

[Daniel Wagenaar]

Current trunk (revno #11633) does not list pdf files in "Select file to open" dialog when file type is given as "All Inkscape files" on Linux (Ubuntu 12.04).

Manually typing the name of a pdf file results in a pop-up error: "Failed to load the requested file: ..." and a message "parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found" written to stderr. (It appears as though Inkscape treats the pdf file as if it were an svg file.)

My config.log is attached.

[Daniel Wagenaar (dawagenaar)]

Sorry. Can I retract that bug report? It appears that my libpoppler configuration got messed up. However, it is still noteworthy that "configure" does not complain and gleefully reports "Enable Poppler-Cairo: yes" even if the header files are absent. Rather than reporting whether enabling poppler-cairo was requested, it would be more helpful if "configure" reported whether enabling poppler-cairo was successful.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

> configure:20565: checking for POPPLER

According to the configure log, poppler is not detected.

Could you verify you have all dependencies installed (including the poppler header files) and - if not - install them, reconfigure and rebuild Inkscape so that PDF import support is used?
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingUbuntu#Additional_dependencies>

Likely a duplicate of
Bug #600793 “Unable to load PDF "
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/600793>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

> gleefully reports "Enable Poppler-Cairo: yes"

Note that 'poppler-cairo' is not required for default PDF import (AFAIK it is used for the preview image in the import dialog, and for the alternative PDF import file type (experimental, only enabled in trunk)).

[su_v (suv-lp)]

configure test:
<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/trunk/view/head:/configure.ac#L569>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Closing report as duplicate of bug #600793 based feedback (pdf import was actually disabled due to messed-up libpoppler configuration).

Improved detection & reporting of poppler support (including presence of headers) in configure.ac should be tracked in a separate report.

<off-topic>
Current trunk has two PDF input extensions:
1) default (inkscape): "Adobe PDF (*.pdf)"
   src/extension/internal/pdfinput/pdf-input.{cpp,h}
2) experimental (or 'basic'): "Adobe PDF via poppler-cairo (*.pdf)"
   src/extension/internal/pdf-input-cairo.{cpp,h}

The second one had been enabled in rev 10014 based on <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/35685> and <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/35781> - it's unclear to me whether both extensions should be enabled by default in release versions, or whether there are further plans (e.g. by theAdib) to unify the two input extensions into a single PDF import dialog with additional options e.g. to support importing text outlined as paths (poppler-cairo actually creates a grouped path for each character and embeds all reused characters subsetted as cloned symbols into the SVG document).
</off-topic>

Feel free to revert the duplicate status of this report if you think it would be better/easier to reuse it to track changes to configure.ac for improved libpoppler detection.