Installing Xpdf from Source on Linux

Some Linux machines that I use at work have older versions of software and Xpdf, at version 3.00, is one of them.  The rendering is ugly and it spews out a lot of errors when I’m using on the shell.  So I decided to install the newest version manually from source.  I cannot be a superuser on those Linux boxes, so I’m doing a local (not system-wide) installation under my home directory, e.g., /home/johndoe.

First, download the libraries and Xpdf to /home/johndoe/src:

• xpdf-3.02.tar.gz
• t1lib-5.1.0.tar.gz
• freetype-2.3.1.tar.bz2

Then follow this:

$ cd /home/johndoe/src

$ tar -xvzf t1lib-5.1.0.tar.gz
$ cd t1lib-5.1.0
$ ./configure --prefix=/home/johndoe
$ make; make install

$ cd ..
$ tar -xvjf freetype-2.3.1.tar.bz2
$ cd freetype-2.3.1
$ ./configure --prefix=/home/johndoe
$ make; make install

$ cd ..
$ tar -xvzf xpdf-3.02.tar.gz
$ cd xpdf-3.02
$ export LD_RUN_PATH=/home/johndoe/lib
$ ./configure --with-t1-library=/home/johndoe/lib \
              --with-t1-includes=/home/johndoe/include \
              --with-freetype2-library=/home/johndoe/lib \
              --with-freetype2-includes=/home/johndoe/include \
              --with-Xm-library=/usr/X11R1/lib \
              --with-Xm-includes=/usr/X11R6/include \
              --prefix=/home/johndoe
$ make; make install

That’s it.  The executable should now be installed at /home/johndoe/bin/xpdf.