PDF: Quality of Document Rendering on BSDs

[vermaden]

A simple comparision of Evince (epdfview does the same) and Sumatra PDF using WINE (Sumatra PDF is open-source software, but written for Windows platform).

Evince vs. Sumatra | RENDERING


Evince vs. Sumatra | MEMORY USAGE


What is more funny, its more memory efficient to use Sumatra PDF using WINE then Evince natively ... guess whats my new PDF viewer

[1] http://projects.gnome.org/evince/
[2] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

PS. If You are scared about lack of WINE on amd64, then I have good message for You, these screenshots are from FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 using package by Ivoras available here: http://people.freebsd.org/~ivoras/wine/

[Oko]

Originally Posted by vermaden

Sumatra PDF using WINE (Sumatra PDF is open-source software, but written for Windows platform).

That is only partially true. Sumatra PDF rendering libraries are ported to Unix!
mupdf is absolutely the most minimalistic PDF viewer written in pure C which uses the Sumatra PDF rendering libraries. Most OpenBSD people I know of use mupdf, myself included.

$ uname -a
OpenBSD oko.bagdala2.net 4.8 GENERIC.MP#361 i386
$ pkg_info mupdf
Information for inst:mupdf-0.6p0
Comment:
graphic library, pdf parser, viewer and utilities

Description:
MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C.

Most FreeBSD people I know of use MAC Consequently mupdf port on FreeBSD has been broken for ages. Looks like TeXLive joke all over again. Good thing Hiroki Sato is the Core Team member so he will fix mupdf as soon as he finishes TeXLive port on which he is working since 2001

[BSDfan666]

Indeed, mupdf is nice for reading the odd book.. doesn't support showing indexes though, so generally I keep epdfview around, xpdf is crap.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

Indeed, mupdf is nice for reading the odd book.. doesn't support showing indexes though, so generally I keep epdfview around, xpdf is crap.

Sure neither it does support search or even a print. So somebody needs to sit down and to write more "user friendly" viewer based on Sumatra PDF libraries. But the most important thing is that those libraries are ported. So somebody already did the was the most difficult job

[BSDfan666]

mupdf supports search, using vi-like bindings, but it's not perfect.. no such thing exists for PDF readers.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

mupdf supports search, using vi-like bindings, but it's not perfect.. no such thing exists for PDF readers.

That is the new information for me. I have been using mupdf since Stuart ported it to OpenBSD. I need to read man pages again

[BSDfan666]

BTW, the issue vermaden is having is a known issue.. mostly about it not antialiasing certain things.

I believe the issue is in poppler/cairo, the library used by epdfview and evince.

On OpenBSD, I don't see the visual distortions.. perhaps something about your specific configuration or the FreeBSD port, what versions do they use?

[Oko]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

mupdf supports search, using vi-like bindings, but it's not perfect.. no such thing exists for PDF readers.

I checked You are not right for version 0.6. Are you suggesting that mupdf version 0.7 which is in 4.9 supports search? You are wrong about the other thing. Xpdf does indeed support search (actually it is called find and it is a binocular icon on the bottom of the reader).

[Oko]

I just checked and yes indeed the version 0.7 of mupdf DOES support search with key /
That is fantastic! Unfortunately I always end up with installation of xpdf since it is required
by Xfig.

[Alphalutra1]

Thanks for the suggestion of mupdf. It works great.

Originally Posted by oko

Consequently mupdf port on FreeBSD has been broken for ages.

Version 0.7 works perfectly installed straight from FreeBSD ports. So it is definitely not broken. Looking at the commit logs, it seems it was broken for less than a month in September. You must not be very old for that being ages

[BSDfan666]

Originally Posted by Oko

I checked You are not right for version 0.6. Are you suggesting that mupdf version 0.7 which is in 4.9 supports search? You are wrong about the other thing. Xpdf does indeed support search (actually it is called find and it is a binocular icon on the bottom of the reader).

I wasn't implying that only mupdf supported search, what I meant was there is no such thing as a perfect PDF reader.

[backrow]

Originally Posted by Oko

I just checked and yes indeed the version 0.7 of mupdf DOES support search with key /

Unfortunately, the search is currently only within a page, not ahead pages. Mupdf is great but not very useful for long documents yet, because of that and the lack of indexes. But this will improve with time, I suspect. I noticed they changed the keybindings several times, but I’m glad they chose vi‐style in the end.

I also found a memory leak but haven’t gotten around to reporting it yet…

[vermaden]

Thanks for suggestion on mupdf, seems I may like it since I also use vi a lot, I was also suggested on FreeBSD Forums, that I may have disabled antialiasing in cairo ... do not remember doing that but who knows.

[TerryP]

It supports vi keystrokes, it's C, and it's small. OK, if there's a package available for Zenwalk, I think Evince is getting retirement!

[Oliver_H]

Ewww, so you're on Linux now? ;-)

[BSDfan666]

Ewwww, indeed.

[Mr-Biscuit]

What's wrong with a user building texlive from source if all of the require dependencies are met?

Originally Posted by Jim

Boy, whut are you using?

Originally Posted by Bob

Ahm using Leenoox, suh. But Ahm trying out BSD.

Originally Posted by JIm

Doesn't that stuff make your pecker fall off?

[TerryP]

Originally Posted by Oliver_H

Ewww, so you're on Linux now? ;-)

At least until the FreeBSD Linuxator grows more, or I have time to extend it.

It's also nice to have easy access to more tools, without having to port them. But it seems, Zenwalk doesn't have a package for mupdf :-/.

[Oliver_H]

Just kidding, sometimes I have to use Linux too.

Btw. building packages for Slackware or derived systems is as easy as configure, make DESTDIR ..., makepkg ..., installpkg ;-)

[IdOp]

Thanks to all posters on this thread, I've installed epdfview and mupdf on both platforms and they look useful.

Originally Posted by TerryP

But it seems, Zenwalk doesn't have a package for mupdf :-/.

Is there any reason you want a package? I compiled the mupdf source on Slackware without incident. Maybe you'll have the same luck on Zenwalk?