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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Best auto-reload supported smooth PDF Viewer? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey people! I want to learn typst, a modern alternative to LaTeX written in Rust.

screenshot

Typst can incrementally compile the files to PDF.

Ironically, there is no incrementally refreshing PDF viewer afaik. So for direct visual output of my progress, I would like the fastest, smoothest PDF viewer.

Firefox loads too slow
Okular fast (thanks for the tips guys), just flickering scrollbar and background icon

It can be as small and minimal for that task as possible.

Priorities:

No flicker (no text re-alignment, no disappearing scroll bars, no changing UI)
Fast refresh
Smooth text refresh (maybe with a fade in)
Generally solid

To test:

evince / GNOME Document viewer
atril
mupdf
zathura
gv

Barebones:

Somehow monitor for changes

pipdf (GTK4, but unmaintained)
pdf_render (very minimal, maintained)
pdf2pwg (needs cargo add and cargo build, only A4 pages which seems totally sufficient)
pdf_renderer (security focused, pure Rust, may crash, incomplete)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think Evince and Atril have a setting for that? Or was it mupdf? Else you could script something with inotifywait or watch.

Btw, just googled it, less automatically uses lesspipe with pdftotext, so watch -n 2 less your.pdf works. Then there's fbpdf and fbgs of fbi.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Could you explain? less would just monitor the binary PDF for changes and then pass that to any viewer?

I think this is really helpful for barebones renderers, thanks! That will be a very good piece of the puzzle for a minimal PDF reader for this task

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

No, less has the LESSOPEN variable, which can be used to run input-preprocessors. lesspipe misuses that to run specific tools with specific mimetypes, in this case pdftotext for pdf files. It's basically equivalent to running pdftotext -layout <file.pdf> | less. Though no images, for that the other tools.