PDF software inventory

Here's an inventory of the PDF manipulation software I have at my disposal for the project. All of these packages are Free Software in the sense that the user has the freedom to run, study, modify, and redistribute the program.

Okular

PDF viewer (GUI)

GNU gv

PDF viewer (GUI)

pdftk

merges and splits PDFs, rotates pages, edits metadata (command-line; GUI via pdftk-qgui)

PDFjam

merges, rotates, and n-ups PDFs (command-line)

PdfMod

adds, reorders, rotates, and removes pages; exports images; edits metadata (GUI)

poppler-tools

lists fonts; extracts images; prints metadata; converts PDF to HTML, PPM, PostScript, or text (command-line)

QPDF

linearizes (web-optimizes) PDFs, various other low-level transformations (command-line)

pspdftool

rearranges, deletes, scales, flips, numbers, crops, rotates, n-ups pages (command-line)

pstoedit

scales, shifts, splits, rotates, and resizes pages; converts PDF to other vector formats (command-line)

Ghostscript

PDF language interpreter; can do pretty much everything, though not necessarily easily (command-line)

PDF viewing woes

I've been running into problems with the programs I use to view the LSE PDFs. For one thing, these PDFs are an average of 261 MB in size, whereas my file manager, Dolphin, won't generate previews for files larger than 100 MB. This is a rather annoying and arbitrary upper limit, especially considering that it takes only a few milliseconds to generate thumbnails for 100 MB PDFs. I've accordingly filed a bug report asking that the limit be removed.

The other problem is that my usual PDF viewer, Okular, is phenomenally slow at rendering the pages of the LSE PDFs—it takes between 10 and 25 seconds per page. (By comparison, the proprietary Adobe Reader renders them almost instantly.) Okular, like many other Free Software document viewers, renders PDFs using the FreeDesktop project's Poppler library, and it is there that the problem lies. Most likely this is due to a known issue, Bug 13518. For now, then, I will be using GNU gv, which isn't based on Poppler and is able to render the LSE PDFs quickly.