Make sure your system is up-to-date. xournal does not even link to libpoppler at all. (Don't use ldd but readelf to check)

post the log with:

LD_DEBUG=files xournal > log 2>&1

Log attached.

I've compiled it from source on my own machine and it runs fine.
Making a symlink to libpoppler.so.7 as libpoppler.so.6 worked as well.

remove symlinks and reinstall xournal from repos. maybe you recompiled some time ago that and it linked to poppler.

I tried that already, it didn't work. (I only added the symlink to test)

What version of the xournal package is it you have installed? (It works fine for me with xournal-0.4.5-2 on i686.)
What is the output of "readelf -d /usr/bin/xournal"? And "sha1sum /usr/bin/xournal"?

hash is 3a72003161936ff1596a4fa0f2f2cce6d21fc0d3
readelf output is attached

This is weird... Your readelf output is correct, and you are indeed using xournal-0.4.5-2-x86_64. But your linker does strange things: libart_lgpl_2 and libgio are only needed by libgnomecanvas-2, but the linker seems to believe they are directly required by xournal; similarly, libpoppler is only supposed to be needed by libpoppler-glib...
Is there anything unusal about your system you are not telling us? :)

pacman -Qs poppler

i think he has an older version of poppler, libpoppler-glib and he symlinked libpoppler-glib.so.5

local/poppler 0.14.4-1
PDF rendering library based on xpdf 3.0
local/poppler-data 0.4.3-1
Encoding data for the poppler PDF rendering library
local/poppler-glib 0.14.4-1
Poppler glib bindings


The exact command I used to make the symlink was:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libpoppler.so.7 /usr/lib/libpoppler.so.6

My system isn't peculiar in any way I know, could I run anything to check this?

Is your entire system up-to-date? Are you withholding any package's upgrade? Did you do "pacman -Syu" recently?

Quite honestly, I don't see recompiling xournal as a satisfying solution until we know exactly what the problem is.

Just to be sure (and also because I'm running out of ideas): could you try installing this package (same PKGBUILD, but freshly compiled in a chroot) and tell me if it has the same issue as the current one? http://arch.vesath.org/all/xournal-0.4.5-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

OK so your package doesn't work either.

I have run pacman -Syu recently and I'm holding back:

haskell-platform ghc cabal-install haskell-mtl haskell-quickcheck haskell-utf8-string haskell-x11-xft xmonad

I doubt any of these would be causing the problem but I suspect your judgement is better than mine.

What does ldd output here? Could be some weird library hanging around somewhere that gets linked instead of the official ones.

I agree none of the packages you're holding back should be a problem.

You mentioned the package you created with makepkg works for you. Could you also try building in a chroot and see if it works? See sections 3 and 4 of: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Building_in_a_Clean_Chroot
Also, could you post somewhere on the Web the output of both makepkg and makechrootpkg and the respective packages they created?

I didn't make a package myself, I built from source and now run it from /usr/local/bin/xournal .
I should add that I built it from CVS source but I've just compiled from current version source and the result is the same.

Well, can you build using the PKGBUILD?...
Edit: And also give the output of "ldd /usr/bin/xournal" as Jan asked...

I'll do the pkgbuild soon; I have coursework deadlines coming up.