lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Yorvyk <yorvik.ubunto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:20:49 +0200
Rafael Laguna <rafaellaguna@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I must to say that I'm agrre, despite my personal preferences in using 
> Evince. I've noticed a bit freeze while scrolling big (and really huge) 
> PDFs (I mean some PDFs I use to generate, some of them are entire books 
> or magazines full of images) and a poor performance generating 
> miniatures. But the others even cannot render this kind of big files, so 
> if Evince is bad the others are worst. But we're looking (always) for 
> another solution in the next release (like a good and speedy 
> presentation software :-\ ).
> 
The 'freezes' and scrolling problems with Evince are also exaggerated by some video drivers as well.  I have Lubuntu on a 2.4 GHz P4 with a SiS chipset and 1GiB of RAM and Evince is horrendous on this machine. Whereas, a machine with a 500MHz PIII and a Matrox Video is a lot better, and quite usable.  The former machine also has serious issues scrolling in FF as well.  I also have Xubuntu on it and that is just the same, as one would expect.   I also have XP on it, for work, and that shows the same scrolling problems in FF.
PDF’s are not the easiest thing to generate either.  There are all manner of settings that can upset PDF readers, embedded fonts, indexes, the resolution and compression, etc.  Not all programs that generate PDF’s do these things in the most optimal manner and not all readers render them in the most optimal manner.  This was demonstrated to me by somebody you had a reasonable idea of what they were doing.  They used to produce three versions of a manual for a company.  A colour one for the printers, a mono one for customers to down-load and print, and a colour one with indexing and search for use online.  When managers decided only one should be produced, it turned out to be the worst of all-worlds.  It failed to produce a good print copy, it was slow to render on screen and generally annoyed everybody that came into contact with it.  You have probably seen PDF’s like this all over the WEB.

So just give a thought for the poor devs that write the software for PDF readers, even Adobe have problems getting both halves of the process to cooperate.


-- 
Steve Cook (Yorvyk)

http://lubuntu.net