[aklug] Re: video system questions

From: Greg Madden <gomadtroll@gci.net>
Date: Tue Feb 21 2012 - 15:19:40 AKST

On Tuesday 21 February 2012 1:50:04 am Christopher Howard wrote:
> On 02/20/2012 04:53 PM, Greg Madden wrote:
> > Thanks for the suggestions, tryed both, none are an improvement in
> > speed over the pdf viewers, though pdf2svg is recommended for
> > those who want to edit a pdf file...good to know, and mirage is a
> > nice light viewer, add to the pile :-)
> >
> > I have noticed, in top, that one processor hits 100%, none of the
> > other cores are used. by the process. If it is a cpu issue seems
> > using more cores would help.
>
> I think the fundamental problem is that PDF isn't an image format, it
> is a portable document format that stores images. Consequently, the
> PDF viewer code base isn't going to be focused on getting the fastest
> possible document -> image -> rendering. To really get that speed you
> are looking for, the software would presumably need be running
> multi-threaded handling of images chunks and utilizing all the
> relevant multimedia instructions or acceleration pipelines to handle
> resizing and layout. PDF viewers aren't made for this.
>
> If I were in your shoes, I'd focus again on the image conversion idea,
> trying to get the PDFs in a format that can be handled by powerful
> image viewer. On my system, I'm finding that the latest version
> (3.2.2) of the image viewer eog <http://www.gnome.org/projects/eog/>
> handles even the most massive JPEGs I have at lightning speed.
>
> As far as rendering PDFs faster, though, you might check to see if you
> have the latest version of evince. On my distro, evince is masked
> stable at 2.32, but has actually progressed up to 3.2.1. You could
> also build from source and pass in some optimizing flags for your
> processor, at least -march=native.
>
> Some other long shots: 1) try launching your PDF viewer with a higher
> nice setting (see NICE(1)); 2) mount a ramdisk and throw a few PDFs
> onto it, and see if they render any faster.

Thank you, a few things are becoming apparent to me.

The pdf viewers in Linux are document viewers, thats even what Gnome calls Evince
these day. Viewing large drawings is a special case ?

Joshua mentioned Acroread from Adobe, it is very fast, 32 bit only.

Image files seem to render faster in their respective viewers than pdf files do in
theirs.

The Plansroom online service scans drawings and has them available in .tiff
format, see the images render fast comments. Good Tiff file viewers are rare.

For the most part kpdf, mupdf (some issues here) are faster here than evince or
epdfview. Most pdf's render acceptably if I use the 'better' foss viewers. i
am using KDE 3.5.12/Debian stable so there may be improvements in newer apps,
Okular, newer versions of GTK viewers.

Thanks for all the responses.

-- 
Peace,
Greg
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Tue Feb 21 15:25:36 2012

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Feb 21 2012 - 15:25:36 AKST