> We have a new pdf parser (pplib from Paweł Jackowski) that replaces
> poppler.  It is much smaller, a bit faster and it's written in
> pure C [...]

Is there a project page for pplib?  The source code of this library
contained in TeXLive is very, very uncommented – in particular, a
description of the API is completely missing, AFAICS.  It also comes
with overly long lines and extremely densely written C code; it almost
feels as if the original source has been written with cweb or
something like that.