Re: RFS: xpdf (updated package)
On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 02:43:38PM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote:
> Hi, there.
>
> On Jun 03 2010, Stanislav Maslovski wrote:
> > This change is for sure quite significant. BTW, do you know if the
> > internal code in xpdf is equivalent feature wise to poppler? I know
> > that poppler was a spin-off of the rendering code of xpdf. Do you know
> > how much they deviate one from another?
>
> I have been keeping in touch with Michael about such smaller version of
> xpdf and, in fact, I started a xpdf-poppler project, that I announced at
>
> http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog/2010/05/27/please-let-me-zoom-my-documents/
>
> and that I am hosting at
>
> http://github.com/rbrito/xpdf-poppler/
>
> Unfortunately, Michael didn't inform me that some Gentoo people had been
> already working on this, but that's not a problem and I will adopt the
> changes that he has in his codebase.
>
> Now addressing some of your concerns, I have already spent the last 3 or
> 4 days on the code of xpdf and the its rendering is "by parts" of a
> page, in contrast with that of epdfview and evince, which render a whole
> page in memory and, in particular, if you choose a large zoom factor,
> they barf on that.
Yes, I also had a similar idea of how does it work.
> > The reason of my question is that there are several pdf viewers in the
> > repository based on poppler. One of them is evince which often crashes
> > on large pdf files. In these cases xpdf was an
> > old-and-slow-but-always-working solution.
>
> I have some questions here:
>
> * What do you mean by "old"? Old looking, perhaps, but thats due to its
> use of lesstif, right? Or did you mean anything else?
Well, I mean that it has been around for quite a while. I think I have
been using it since at least 10 years ago.
> * What do you mean by "slow"? In most cases, I think that it is, at
> least, of the same speed as others, even if using poppler.
Currently scrolling in xpdf is visually slower than in evince (yes, I
know about that compiler-related bug #577031: I am using a version
which is not affected).
> I have not yet benchmarked the differences between "pure" xpdf and
> xpdf+poppler, but I would say that they are very minor.
Then the diffrence in scrolling between evince and xpdf is probably
only because xpdf renders "by parts".
--
Stanislav
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