Comment 10 for bug 965463

There is a little C program pdf2svg

   http://www.cityinthesky.co.uk/opensource/pdf2svg/

that does all of the example conversions PDF->SVG cited here beautifully. It is nothing more than a thin layer over Poppler and Cairo. The pdf-parser.cpp file in Inkscape says:

 * PDF parsing using libpoppler.
 *
 * Derived from poppler's Gfx.cc

So I grabbed poppler 0.24.5 and built it, which among other things produced the pdftocairo program, and then used that to do:

  utils/pdftocairo -svg /tmp/reassemble_decorate.pdf /tmp/pop_reassemble_decorate.svg
  utils/pdftocairo -svg /tmp/PDFtest.pdf /tmp/pop_PDFtest.svg

and those SVG files too, not surprisingly, were just fine.

I googled to find some discussion of the history of the pdf conversion code in Inkscape, but the keywords were too common, so I didn't find it.

Why is Inkscape "rolling its own" for PDF to SVG conversion, rather than just using poppler and cairo like these two utilities do? Is there some functionality missing from the poppler/cairo route that the Inkscape version implements? I am all for custom code when it adds functions, or works better, but here the simple utilities and standard libraries are handling simple text conversion tasks that Inkscape's code botches.