Re: [gentoo-user] pdf viewing suggestions?

[Willie Wong]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 01:01:37AM +0900, daid kahl wrote:
> I've tried xpdf, epdfview, evince, kpdf, and acroread.

> I want something fast for big files, prints well, and has an interface that
> doesn't remind me of pure and natural X.  I don't mind the little page
> overview as a side-tool, but I don't strictly require it.

Speedwise I don't think epdfview/evince/kpdf will be all that much
different. They are all based on the poppler framework just with
different frontends. Poppler is, in turn, based on the xpdf rendering
parts. 

Acroread is, well acroread, and I try to avoid it whenever I can. 

> evince will take an arbitrarily long time to print documents that are long
> or have big figures.

That's odd. I use evince at work (though not on gentoo; work computer
is a heavily customized version of scientific linux) and I don't have
the printing problem. If it weren't for the Gnome dependencies that I
don't want on my laptop, I'd also use evince at home. (Hum, just
checked it out again now, and it looks like the dependency list is
shorter than I remembered it being?)

> The interface for xpdf is pretty lame (especially default printing), but
> it's quick as demons chasing bats out of hell.

But it works. It is my pdf viewer of choice at home. 

One thing I am waiting to see is epdf from the enlightenment
libraries. It is still masked, and is in the enlightenment overlay.
In the sunrise overlay there is a program called apvlv. I have never
tried it myself, but the codebase is small and it has a UI based on
the VIM UI (for better or for worse).

You probably know this already, but gv doesn't work too well a lot of
times.

Unfortunately there aren't that many pdf viewing softwares to choose from.

Cheers, 

W 

-- 
Willie W. Wong                                     wwong@××××××××××××××.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire 
         et vice versa   ~~~  I. Newton