How can I embed a PDF viewer in a cross-platform C++ application?

Question

I need to embed a PDF viewer in my application. Is there any free software I can use?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Have a look at poppler

If you have Qt have a look at this.

Answer 2

You could use libpopler, which is based on xpdf. There is a QT frontend, if you're already using that.

There is also ghostscript, which can render PDFs (and Postscript, of course). Generally, I'd prefer popler, as popler seems faster.

There is MuPDF, which is also an Artifex product.

Popler is under the GPL version 2 (or later, I believe). The newest versions of Ghostscript are GPL 3, but you can get commercial licenses to it (or at least older versions) from Artifex. MuPDF is GPL as well, with commercial licenses available from Artifex.

Answer 3

There is a list of development libraries on wikinfo. The only free PDF viewing libraries currently on there (MuPDF and Poppler) are GPL licensed so you cannot use them if you don't want to give the source code of your application away.