How to install poppler in ubuntu 15.04?

Question

Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base. I have already downloaded the tar.xz file from the official site http://poppler.freedesktop.org/ But I do not know what to do with this file

Is there any command to install or run?

P.S. - I am new to linux, so I don't know a lot about it yet..

Answer 1

What you downloaded from poppler site is source code and you may not be expert enough to install it yourself. For such situations, Ubuntu and other linux distros manage packages of popular software so you don't have to go through manual installation via source code. In your case, poppler for python is available in package python-poppler which can be installed via Ubuntu's package manager apt.

To install poppler python bindings open terminal and run this:

sudo apt-get install python-poppler

You should have poppler available in python then.

To search for such packages in future you can do apt-cache search poppler. It will list down all packages you can install via apt.

Answer 2

Not sure how it worked in 15.04, but I know in 16.04 (Xenial), the package's official name is poppler-utils:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/poppler-utils

And thus can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install -y poppler-utils

The marked answer by codefreak is not correct if you need the poppler-command-line tools, such as pdftotext. Also, installing Python poppler via apt-get doesn't seem to play nice if you're on a customized system, e.g. one that is running off of the Anaconda distribution.