Thanks to Wookey for that link, I have downloaded and installed SumatraPDF on Windows. This PDF reader appears to tick all the boxes. It renders surveys nicely, does not lock the PDF file, and auto-reloads the PDF when Therion rewrites it. Now I can have my PDFs all open in Sumatra, and just click compile in xTherion and see my changes in the PDF as soon as it is regenerated. If I want to re-render my entire survey rather than the bit I am working on then I just hit CTRL+t in Notepad++ with my Run command I emailed about yesterday, and that PDF is updated and displayed automatically too.
I have added details of SumatraPDF and the PDFreaders.org link to the wiki on this page: http://therion.speleo.sk/wiki/doku.php/contrib:externalviewers Footleg On 15 January 2013 21:38, Wookey <wookey at wookware.org> wrote: > > 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/
