Searching PDF Files With grep

The poppler-tools RPM doesn't appear to be the standard (yet -- see below), therefore it may not be available on all distros (which is probably why it's not on rpmfind.net). I have SLED11, based on OpenSuSE 11, but there is no poppler-tools RPM. I was not able to check Fedora, RedHat or Debian-based distros (i.e. Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc).

However, like I said, all of the contents of poppler-tools are included in xpdf-tools (with the exception of pdftohtml and pdftoabw). This is available from rpmfind.net for a few distros and appears to be more readily available for the more common distros.

The "rpm --what-provides..." in your tip would still apply regardless of what the source RPM is; however, I mention xpdf-tools to help users who may be confused by their own results of what is returned by --what-provides, which may not necessarily be poppler-tools. The functionality of the pdfto[whatever] tools appears to be similar, though.

Result of rpm -qp poppler-tools-0.8.2-1.1.i586.rpm --info:

Poppler is a fork of the xpdf PDF viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of
Glyph and Cog, LLC. The purpose of forking xpdf is twofold. First, to
provide PDF rendering functionality as a shared library to centralize
the maintenence effort. Today a number of applications incorporate the
xpdf code base and whenever a security issue is discovered, all these
applications exchange patches and put out new releases. In turn, all
distributions must package and release new versions of these xpdf based
viewers. It is safe to say that there is a lot of duplicated effort
with the current situation. Even if poppler in the short term
introduces yet another xpdf-derived code base to the world, it is hoped
that over time these applications will adopt poppler. After all, we
only need one application to use poppler to break even.

Second, we would like to move libpoppler forward in a number of areas
that do not fit within the goals of xpdf. By design, xpdf depends on
very few libraries and runs on a wide range of X-based platforms. This
is a strong feature and reasonable design goal. However, poppler
intends to replace parts of xpdf that are now available as standard
components of modern Unix desktop environments. One such example is
fontconfig, which solves the problem of matching and locating fonts on
the system in a standardized and well understood way. Another example
is cairo, which provides high quality 2D rendering. See the file TODO
for a list of planned changes.

So, as with most things in the whacky world of open-source, it would appear poppler-tools is trying to move away from xpdf-based code and rely solely on libpoppler. This basically gives users a choice of which PDF library implementation to use.