For whatever reason, xpdf has disappeared from the Debian testing repository. It’s a nuisance since it seems to be the best combination of fast and usable among the various non-adobe pdf readers. It appears that a version has been reintroduced to sid, but it’s been awhile now and I wanted a working pdf reader.
So I opted to build it from source.
The downloads are here. I grabbed all the patches and applied them as well. I’ll confess it took me awhile to get it built, but in the end it’s actually straight forward. My problem was figuring out the dependencies to perform the build. I have a minimalistic system, so I had to add the following dev packages:
- libmotif-dev
- libt1-dev
- x11proto-print-dev
- x11proto-core-dev
- libxt-dev
I had a heckuva time figuring those out until I finally started looking in the config.log file that the configure script generated. There I was able to see the details of the problems that were occurring- mostly not being able to find certain headers. From there, I used the package search engine on debian.org to search for those headers and the packages they belonged to.
Once I had these, the last piece was telling the configure script where the xfreetype2 headers are:
./configure --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2
Next it was make followed by make install as root.
And now I don’t have to worry about when the xpdf-reader package becomes available again.