+++ Vasily Vl. Suhachev [2013-01-10 08:55 +0800]: > Hello > > > On Ubuntu Adobe Reader 9 not locks the file and allowing Ctrl+R to refresh > > >I tried the following other readers: Evince: Does not lock the file, > >so I can recompile my Therion project with the PDF open on my second > >monitor, already zoomed into the area I am working on. The PDF > >refreshes automatically when Therion completes generating it. Very > >nice. > > It is slow on medium and large maps. And it has crippled and slow zoom. > But on small maps Evince is very nice. > > Also on Linux exists xpdf. It is non-locking and slow. And it crashes > when I open Therion PDFs on recent Ubuntu.
I've been using epdfview for a while now (ever since the idiots that package evince decide they don't care about mimetypes any more becuase it's 'old-fashioned', so they ignore older apps that ask for a pdf viewer, and epdfview picks up the request) It's very similar in many ways (same underlying poppler libraries, same GTK widgets) but doesn't have the crummy limted zoom feature of evince. Very nice for general work. It is pretty slow to zoom with big PDFs though. Looks like it re-renders the whole page rather than just the current viewport. Worse than evince. It tries to do a quick-zoom with unchanged resolution but somehow still takes ages over it. There are lots of others. The FSFe keep a list here: http://pdfreaders.org/ (as part of their campaign to get the world to stop giving adobe free advertising) mupdf (also available for windows) is faster than both. Very simple with no graphical controls at all (use keys). can use -r to specify initial resolution (very handy toavoid lots of slow zooms on huge PDFs) xpdf renders like mupdf but has (old) motif-style control. It has prressive rendering which is nice - you can see something happening. It also doesn't render all the stuff off screen, which is quicker, except when dragging too far. Zoom seems quite slow though, just less boring as you get to watch :-) possibly slowest of the lot. okular (also available for windows and macos) is a pretty QT-based viewer. It gets the 'fast-zoom at unchanged resolution, render accurately later' thing right so is nice to use on big maps. You can zoom by area selection too. Very handy. Seems to run out of memory on my machine at high zoom levels (250% on a 5000x4000 px image). Maybe it was just taking forever. Rendering is slow but UI is nice so it matters less. It has loads of features. Export a segment as image, automatically reload on doc-change, options to tradoff memory use for speed The locking problem doesn't seem to exist on Linux, so they are all fine there. All have 'r' meaning reload. Only okular reloads to the zoom/position you were last at. This would be a useful feature to add in others. A PDF viewer optimised for huge single-page images rather than multipage docs would be a useful thing. The codebases for the above are all available if anyone gets enthused. So. I think okular and mupdf come out as best for big map viewing. evince and xpdf tied for bottom. I got bored before trying all the ones in the list. I didn't test anything with fancy transparency layers to see how they vary. One could do a proper test with some example (large/tricky/easy) PDFs and do timings and memory-usage checks. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/
