Alternatives to Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Xpdf.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
Poppler provides pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo as a GPL library and utilities, but comes without its own viewer application.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
MuPDF combines a fast minimal viewer with the mutool command-line toolkit on desktop and mobile, under AGPL with paid commercial licensing.
mutool (MuPDF)
Command-line companion to MuPDF for PDF extraction, cleaning and merging.
mutool is a command-line tool for PDF extraction, cleaning and merging, adding merging but offering no graphical viewer.
pdf2htmlEX
A command-line converter that turns PDF files into HTML while keeping text and layout.
pdf2htmlEX focuses on PDF to HTML conversion with closer layout matching, but it is Linux command line only with no packaged releases.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Xpdf as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Ghostscript
PostScript and PDF interpreter behind a great deal of other software.
Xpdf provides a viewer and command-line tools for text, image and HTML extraction, but does not interpret PostScript or compress PDFs for print.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
qpdf
Command-line tool for content-preserving PDF transformations.
pdfcpu
Go library and command line for validating and transforming PDFs.
zathura
A minimal, keyboard-driven document viewer with plugin support for PDF, PostScript and DjVu.
Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux.
PDFtk Server
Command-line PDF toolkit for merging, splitting and stamping.
