To be honest the title more or less covers it but if you are interested in the back story…
My wife recently picked up a couple of sewing patterns online. In order to cope with the fact that humans do not come in well defined standardized sizing the sewing pattern used a seldom used PDF feature called layers to allow one PDF to contain the outlines for 10 different sizes at the same time.
On the other hand the eventual recipient of the garment in question comes in one excellently defined size making it convenient to disable the unwanted layers and make it easier to cut out the pattern pieces.
Hence we started to look for a PDF reader for GNU/Linux that allows the layers to be enabled and disabled… and the search engines let us down. They either led us down blind alleys of no longer supported editors (together with warnings that they might not support printing) through to Adobe Reader being packaged alongside Wine on an app store in a manner that works (just about) until one tried to print.
We came very close to giving up and asking someone to do it from windows… but then I discovered that the venerable xpdf is still maintained and actively making releases. I knew that xpdf is based on a different PDF library to many of the newer viewers and that it has always had a pretty comprehensive feature set. “It’s a long shot but it might just work” and it did. All that was left to do was churn out a blog post alongside a pithy title that seeks to reeducate the search engines.
xpdf is a PDF viewer for GNU/Linux that supports layers… and has (at least on Fedora 31) a working print button!
