Please provide configure option to compile without fontconfig
Submitted by Otfried Cheong
Assigned to poppler-bugs
Description
Please make it possible to compile poppler without fontconfig.
Fontconfig is quite a large dependency when you need to bundle it with your application (this is for OSX), in particular since it also pulls in libexpat and probably some other things.
It is also only used in borderline cases. Since PDF 1.5, PDF fonts are strongly recommended to embed all fonts - so fontconfig is actually only useful for ill-formed PDF files.
My application uses poppler only for parsing PDF files and provides its own renderer, so it's somewhat annoying that I need to bundle a large library that's completely useless or hack the poppler build process myself.
Note that Freetype supports building without fontconfig since 2009 (see #19253), so this has no impact on the dependency on Freetype - which is really all you need to render fonts embedded in the PDF file.