Re: RFS: xpdf (updated package)
On Sat, 5 Jun 2010 02:20:22 +0400 Stanislav Maslovski wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 04:05:21PM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> > I can't say anything definitive, but I can speculate that it will
> > not be a problem, and here is the logic:
> >
> > xpdf's rendering code is itself essentially an older version of
> > poppler. I doubt the poppler developers have intentionally made that
> > code itself any slower, and it was possible to interface xpdf to
> > poppler without a significant rewrite (a couple minor few-line patches
> > and a bunch of variable renaming that doesn't have any impact). Hence
> > any performance differences to be found between evince and xpdf will
> > reside in the non-poppler code. Restated; even with switch to poppler,
> > the original xpdf zoom/display logic remains, and that will be the
> > primary driving factor for performance.
> >
> > But even so, it should be tested.
>
> BTW, where did you get it from that my main concerns are about speed?
> You seem to be focused only on this. Actually, my point was quite the
> contrary, please re-read my mails.
>
> We already have a poppler-based viewer which is reasonably fast - it
> is evince, but unfortunately it does not work enough well with every
> possible pdf file (often crashes).
Technically evince is xpdf-based; poppler is just the name of the
xpdf code that was turned into a shared library. The same conclusions
for crashiness can be reached via the same speculative logic that I made
for performance.
> On the other hand, xpdf opens all
> files without any problems, but can be a bit slower in scrolling
> sometimes. The last is not a problem. I am simply afraid that with
> your change xpdf will follow evince's path and there will be no
> reliable pdf viewer in the repository anymore.
If you can pinpoint some example files that crash evince but work fine
in xpdf, I will test them. So far, I have not encountered any issues
myself. Gentoo has been shipping xpdf-poppler for a few years now, and I
haven't seen any complaints of your nature there (although I have not
done an exhaustive search).
Best wishes,
Mike
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