Martin Schröder wrote:
But in fact there may be more - and you may also have some wishes about PDF parsing and manipulation that need to be added yet.
If we would start pdfTeX now, we would probably use much more (Taco, are you listening? :-). E.g. pdfTeX has a complete machinery for parsing font files, while poppler probably also has code for that. And the code for writing objects is also duplicated and quite low-level in pdfTeX. So there is definitely duplicate functionality.
If poppler is just using fontconfig + freetype2 for local font discovery for to-be-opened pdf docs (this is my current understanding), then that would be only about as useful for pdfTeX as that same code in xetex already is. And that is not very much, I am afraid. OTOH, if poppler is not only a pdf rendering library but also a pdf creation library (or aspires to become that, then it is quite likely that there will be some overlap that could possibly be merged one way or the other. I do not know enough about poppler (or about pdf in general, for that matter) to say something definate about this, sorry. I never have had to anything with the pdf image inclusion, so I am not a suited person to respond about that part, at all. Best, Taco