PDF viewing woes: update

In March 2010 I reported on a couple problems viewing PDFs. The first problem was that my file manager, Dolphin, was unable to generate previews of some PDFs due to an arbitrary limit on file sizes. The second problem was slow rendering of the PDFs in my viewer, Okular. I'm pleased to report that the first of these issues has been fixed, and the second is due to be fixed in the next stable release series of Poppler (the PDF rendering library used by Okular).

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.