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/

 

[xibo]

This is hardly representative. How much memory does wineserver ( or whatever it's called ) consume? Furthermore evince isn't exactly a program famous for being resource-friendly. Visual Studio will use less memory then kdevelop, too. But like evince, kdevelop has more useful features for us (well, some of us) therefore it's worth the price.

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/

This is useful.

 

[dandelion]

Looks OK here. I guess you have antialiasing turned off somewhere, e.g. poppler, cairo.

 

[wblock@]

The FreeBSD version looks like antialiasing is disabled or not as good. A free document that could be used as a test case would be good.

 

[aragon]

What is more funny, its more memory efficient to use Sumatra PDF using WINE then Evince natively

Is it fair to compare a 32 bit app's memory usage with that of a 64 bit app's? Let's see memory usage for a 32 bit Evince linked against 32 bit libraries...

A free document that could be used as a test case would be good.

Yes.

 

[vermaden]

A free document that could be used as a test case would be good.

Take any PDF document You like with raster graphics (an embedded JPEG for example).

Looks OK here. I guess you have antialiasing turned off somewhere, e.g. poppler, cairo.

I currently have FreeBSD 8.2-RC3 but with packages still from 8.1-RELEASE (the FTP dir .../amd64/packages-8.2-release/... is still not accessible) so maybe that is the problem, which version You are using, You use Evince there?

On daemonforums I got suggestion to use http://mupdf.com/ which uses Sumatra PDF libraries (these are ported to Linux/UNIX).

 

[dandelion]

Take any PDF document You like with raster graphics (an embedded JPEG for example).

Try

Index: graphics/evince/Makefile
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/ncvs/ports/graphics/evince/Makefile,v
retrieving revision 1.63
diff -u -p -r1.63 Makefile
--- graphics/evince/Makefile	4 Dec 2010 07:31:56 -0000	1.63
+++ graphics/evince/Makefile	11 Feb 2011 18:44:02 -0000
@@ -128,6 +128,8 @@ post-patch:
 	@${REINPLACE_CMD} -e '/^DOC_MODULE_VERSION/d' \
 		${WRKSRC}/help/reference/libdocument/Makefile.in \
 		${WRKSRC}/help/reference/libview/Makefile.in
+	@${REINPLACE_CMD} 's/CAIRO_FILTER_FAST/CAIRO_FILTER_BEST/' \
+		${WRKSRC}/libview/ev-view.c
 
 post-install:
 	@-update-desktop-database

which version You are using, You use Evince there?

/head + poppler-0.14.5 + cairo-0.11.2 + graphics/zathura. zathura (C) is ligthweight pdf-viewer compared to evince (bloatware), epdfview (C++), apvlv (C++). Because they all use poppler pdf-rendering should be similar.

 

[wblock@]

Take any PDF document You like with raster graphics (an embedded JPEG for example).

Those should be PostScript splines; I wouldn't expect antialiasing of raster graphics. Using a certain PDF as a benchmark would allow comparison between systems.