xpdfrc - Configuration File for All Xpdf Utilities

1. Download the software and fonts

You may have already downloaded the Xpdf tools while watching one of my earlier videos in the series, but there has since been an upgrade from Version 3 to Version 4 and there is a new download site:

https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html

Visit that site and download the pre-compiled Windows binary ZIP archive, then unzip it.

Download the Symbol and Zapf Dingbats fonts from the same page.

2. Locate the documentation folder for the Xpdf utilities

Go to the folder where you unzipped the downloaded ZIP file and find the doc folder.

3. Read the documentation for the configuration file - xpdfrc

Go into the doc folder and find the plain text file called xpdfrc.txt.

Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and read it. This is the documentation for the configuration file.

4. Review the sample configuration file

Go into the doc folder and find the plain text file called sample-xpdfrc.

Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and review it. This is a sample configuration file.

5. Set up a test folder

Create a test folder.

Copy these files into your test folder:
pdftoppm.exe
pdftops.exe
d050000l.pfb
s050000l.pfb

Copy a sample PDF file into your test folder.

6. Create the xpdfrc file

Using any text editor, such as Notepad, create a plain text file in your test folder and name it xpdfrc (without the .txt file extension) and put these two lines in it:

fontFile Symbol "s050000l.pfb"
fontFile ZapfDingbats "d050000l.pfb"

7. Run the PDFtoPPM and PDFtoPS utilities

Run the same commands as shown in my PDFtoPPM and PDFtoPS videos, which produced these font errors:
Config Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
Config Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'

Confirm that the errors no longer occur — due to the fixes in the xpdfrc file.

8. Experiment with other features in the configuration file

That completes your first test of the xpdfrc configuration file. I encourage you to experiment with its many capabilities.

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Thank you for completing my Experts Exchange video Micro Tutorial series on the Xpdf utilities. I hope you've enjoyed watching it as much as I've enjoyed creating it. Regards, Joe