[texworks] Wishlist for pdf previewer

[Carlo Marmo]

not sure this is duable or relevant for most of you. what about adding an
index of readability tool like ms word?

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 2:34 AM, Charlie Sharpsteen <chuck at sharpsteen.net>wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Charlie Sharpsteen <chuck at sharpsteen.net>wrote:
>
>> The amount of memory the new viewer consumes at high zoom levels is
>> pretty appalling---it will eat gigabytes once the zoom level gets over
>> 1000%. We'll need to figure out how to cut this down via smart caching of
>> pixmaps and perhaps tiling out the page renders at high zoom. Splash didn't
>> seem to be capable of partial page renders as it renders the whole page and
>> then crops the result.
>>
>> If Cairo can do a partial pages, it would make a very strong argument for
>> using it as our render backend.
>>
>> -Charlie
>>
>
> Bad news on the partial render front---looks like Poppler just can't do
> it---at least not in an efficient manner. Every page render request,
> regardless of the backend that is used, causes Poppler to re-parse the
> entire page rather than parsing once and then working off of some sort of
> cache. The parsing requires the most time and processor power so splitting a
> large pixmap up into tiles basically multiplies the rendering time by the
> number of tiles that are used.
>
> Discussions and bug reports in other projects:
>
>    - Evince: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303365
>    - Okular: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148527
>
> I think Okular's method of dealing with the problem makes the best of a bad
> situation--once the amount of pixels in a rendering request exceeds a
> certain value, they just ignore it. So the user can zoom in as much as they
> like, but after a point things just stay fuzzy. This would be pretty easy to
> implement in our current rendering setup.
>
>
> If only there was an open source PDF library that provided threadsafe
> partial rendering...
>
> -Charlie
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/attachments/20110926/0628b8a6/attachment.html>