Have you found this site useful? Did we save you time? Did we cure your head-ache? Is your hair growing back now?

Please make a donation to help with maintenance.

XPDF Howto

For Mandrake 9.1
September 2003
Herman Oosthuysen
Copyright 2003, GPL, http://www.gnu.org

General

Xpdf is a powerful and simple Portable Document File viewer. Konqueror is configured to use KGhostview to view PDF files, but it has quite a few bugs and can't render all PDF files properly. Xpdf is much better, but the default installation of Mandrake Linux requires a couple of tweaks to make it work properly.

Notably, the default paper size is wrong for North America and printing doesn't work. See man xpdf for details.

Configuration

The xpdf configuration file is /etc/xpdfrc.

The paper size is set with the psPaperSize directive. Change it to letter:

psPaperSize letter

The print command depends on your printer installation. If you use CUPS and your printer is called lp0, then use the following, else modify to suit:

psFile "|lpr -P lp0"

This will pipe the output of xpdf to the CUPS system.

That's it!

Context Menu

Yes, xpdf does have a context menu. Right click hold and drag down then select what you want to do, as with a Macintosh - for instance rotate the image by 90 degrees, a common task to view a funny document.

Happy xpdfing.
Herman