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oneway

Member

Registered: 2009-04-20

Posts: 19

PDF viewer for large files

Hello,
i want to view a very large PDF file (~1GB, ~500 pages). The viewers i tested (okular, evince, xpdf) are slow: if i browse through the document one page loads a specific time and is displayed. If i switch to the next page i have to wait again.
Is there a viewer that loads the rest of the document while i read the first pages to scroll through the document without waiting after a while?

Last edited by oneway (2009-05-12 19:28:07)

MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

Re: PDF viewer for large files

Try konqueror's built-in preview/pdf mode perhaps & set it to load a lot of stuff into ram in its preferences, if possible?

oneway

Member

Registered: 2009-04-20

Posts: 19

Re: PDF viewer for large files

I set the memory usage in okular to aggressive but it seems that only one page is preloaded. But i want that more pages (as many as possible, i have 4GB ram) are preloaded.

Wilco

Member

Registered: 2008-11-09

Posts: 440

Re: PDF viewer for large files

epdfview is pretty lightweight and might work (although GTK is not so good with large things). You can also try the proprietary pdf viewer from adobe.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: PDF viewer for large files

Most free and open source will die with large PDFs. Perhaps acroread?

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: PDF viewer for large files

Perhaps, just perhaps it'd work better if you copied it to tmpfs and read from there?

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: PDF viewer for large files

lucke has a good suggestion. Also try my personal favorite PDF reader, SumatraPDF. It's open source, but Windows-only, try it in Wine. It uses a different rendering engine than the others. xpdf has its own engine, as does acroread, but all the others IIRC use Poppler. Sumatra uses MuPDF, so you may have better luck with it.

oneway

Member

Registered: 2009-04-20

Posts: 19

Re: PDF viewer for large files

Thanks so long.
acroread renders the pages very fast. That's what i want - but it's proprietary:/
For the moment it's ok but i'd like to have a free alternative to acroread that shows the pages as quick as acroread or preloads more than 1 page.

Perhaps, just perhaps it'd work better if you copied it to tmpfs and read from there?

I've tried it: no improvement.

Edit: tried Sumatra: an improvement compared to Okular etc. Thanks.

Last edited by oneway (2009-05-12 21:50:10)