[tex-live] TeXLive2007: Bug in (Xe)TeX for 64bit and big endianess

[Taco Hoekwater]

Thanh Han The wrote:
> 
> I mean this: those patches while trying to fix certain
> issues, might bring another class of problems themselves,
> and we don't want to deal with things that are issues of
> distributors. We don't want to prevent third-parties to use
> poppler instead of xpdf, but we also don't want to be
> dependent of poppler. At least for the moment. So pdftex
> should be built with xpdf code by default, and anyone who
> wishes to use poppler instead is free to do so. Martin has
> promised to provide an easy way to do that. Or anyone from
> the distributors can submit a patch for this purpose. And if
> Taco considers the patch good enough, it will be in.

Let me chime in and also be a little bit more precise. What we
as the pdftex team have agreed upon regarding the poppler/xpdf
situation is the following:

* For the foreseable future, our reference implementation of
   pdftex/luatex will continue to use xpdf (we will switch to the
   new 3.02 release soon). The main reason for sticking with xpdf
   that we require stability, and at the moment poppler is still
   too much in flux for our taste.

* But at the same time, we (Martin) will develop an internal
   wrapper API to hide the differences between xpdf and poppler,
   and also the needed autoconf magic to dynamically compile
   pdftex against a specific, predetermined version of libpoppler
   instead of the static xpdf. Under those conditions, using
   poppler will be officially supported. Bugfixes are OK of course,
   but altogether different versions are "out".

I hope this can be implemented in one of the next bugfix
releases for pdftex 1.40, in a month or two from now.

Best wishes,

Taco