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Re: mupdf (was: xpdf removed from testing?)



> $ apt-cache show mupdf
> MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C.
> (...)

The mupdf PDF reader is supposed to be minimal and makes on me the impression of
being more a reference implementation using the mupdf library.

A more featureful but still light PDF reader, which is able to utilize mupdf as
the rendering backend, is zathura (in Debian) with the mupdf rendering backend
(not in Debian [1]).

The zathura upstream is very lively and is constantly gaining features.

It may be my personal perception, but the fidelity of the PDF rendering in mupdf
is *vastly* superior to xpdf and all the PDF readers (evince, okular ...) which
use libpoppler at this point, resulting in mupdf/libmupdf being AFIK the only
native and free PDF reader available for Linux with a rendering engine that can
rival the proprietary ones like acrobat (in quality, not feature parity).

I therefore suggest packaging zathura with the zathura-pdf-mupdf plugin.

Regards,
Jens.

--
[1] http://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/plugins/zathura-pdf-mupdf/

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:39:24AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2014-01-13 10:43:50 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > While someone could fix the package, you may want to consider not doing
> > so.  After running into endless bugs in xpdf, I personally switched to
> > mupdf for a light-weight PDF reader and found it superior in every respect
> > except for the fact that it doesn't, so far as I can tell, support
> > printing.  So I use mupdf to view PDF documents, and on the rare occasion
> > that I want to print one, I open it in gv (which I find clunkier, but
> > which generally works fine and prints).
> 
> I've just had a look at it, and found that it misses some important
> features present in xpdf, e.g.
> * PDF bookmarks.
> * Permament fit page (i.e. when one resizes the window or with the
>   fullscreen toggle), and BTW, one has to try both W and H.
> * Copy with the left button (the right button is hardly usable with
>   a trackpad for dragging).
> 
> So, it can't be seen as a good replacement for xpdf. Other PDF viewers
> have their own drawbacks as well.
> 
> -- 
> Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
> 
> 
> -- 
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