Commonly used on Linux systems,[4] it powers the PDF viewers of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

By the version 0.18 release in 2011, the poppler library represented a complete implementation of ISO 32000-1,[4] the PDF format standard, and was the first major free PDF library to support its forms (only Acroforms but not full XFA forms)[6][7] and annotations features.

[4] Poppler is a fork of Xpdf-3.0, a PDF file viewer developed by Derek Noonburg of Glyph and Cog, LLC.

There is a patchset available to add support for the Cairo backend to the Qt5 bindings,[12] but the Poppler project does not currently wish to integrate the feature into the library proper.

[6] poppler-utils is a collection of command-line utilities built on Poppler's library API, to manage PDF and extract contents: