I have downloaded Qt SDK (with the libraries) for Linux from the Qt website. Now I want to add the poppler library to it so that I can read PDF files. But the problem is if I install libpoppler-qt4-dev from the Ubuntu repos it pulls all the Qt libs which are already there in the SDK.
How can I simply install poppler without the extra bloat.
I think to do it properly, you'll have to build libpoppler from source. The Qt libraries supplied in the SDK are a different version to those supplied in the usual ubuntu packages.
You could try relying on the binary backwards compatibility of Qt if the versions are similar enough, by downloading (without installing) the libpoppler-qt4-dev package and modifying it's dependencies. But that's a lot of work and might introduce difficult bugs.
Why not install all of the Qt components you need directly from your distro. Mixing third party and distro provided packages can be a pain (as you've seen) so if you can avoid it by sticking to the repositories, you should.