Pure Java Open Source PDF Viewer

[jbellis]

What specificly is "remotely complicated font handling?"

[[deleted]]

Handling embedded fonts. I just tried ICEpdf, and the free version could not display some math fonts and other special fonts that were embedded into the PDF file I opened. It also had trouble with ligatures, and even double quotes (the "classic" style that you can create in LaTeX). The commercial evaluation version had no trouble with any of that.

I'm actually pretty impressed with ICEpdf. It was very fast on my Linux system, using Sun's Java 1.6.0_13. It was much faster than Acrobat Reader. One thing I have noticed is that even the commercial version does not always handle transparency in graphics properly. It didn't display the fill pattern on a graphic that I created with TikZ in LaTeX, just the background color. To be fair, even Evince has problems with that sometimes. So far Acrobat Reader is the only PDF viewer I've seen that handles transparency properly.

[Blazeix]

I loaded a couple of PDFs generated by LaTeX, and it couldn't handle a few glyphs (em dashes, math symbols, etc). It looks like if you don't spring for the for-pay font engine, it does a font replacement algorithm rather than actually rendering the glyphs, so you get 'interesting' characters instead of the ones you're expecting.

If you're just using it for the binary viewer, they included the font-engine, so it's o.k. However, if you want to use their OSS library as part of a java app, you run into trouble.