Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know what "multi-hundred page PDF loads in the blink of an eye" for you but even a 100 blank page PDF takes nearly a second to fully load on my beefy rig (I did the test a few months back to prove a point).

The manual for PGF/TikZ [1] is a huge PDF I frequently open. It's more than 1300 pages and has lots of graphics. It opens and navigates in the blink of an eye on my 3 year old laptop (with the Okular reader). PDFs aren't perfect, but they sure feel spiffy compared to modern webpages.

I do agree with some of the article's complaints, but not this one.

[1] http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf

View on HN

The speed depends a lot on how the PDF is structured. If you export a complex CAD drawing you may have a ridiculous amount of detail that has to be fully rendered before the page can be viewed. Or you can have very simple PDFs that are just a few images.

That is created using LuaTeX and I'm sure the sources behind that PDF document are carefully crafted and LuaTeX works really well. But if you would do the same document with the same amount of images in Microsoft Word and create a PDF document is would be much much bigger and it won't load that quickly.

I will take the last part back, if someone can prove that I'm wrong about Word and PDF documents.

In that case it sounds like a problem with Word and not with PDF.

I wouldn't know – most PDFs I consume are generated by some variant of TeX. I gave a random 300-page datasheet I have lying around a go. It says it was made with Acrobat Distiller and "C2 Rendition". Feels just as spiffy as the PGF/TikZ manual.

All that I wanted to say is: not all PDF documents are created equal, some are really well and some are just awful.

What reader do you use?

Okular [1]. It's strange; I'm a KDE user and big fan of the core DE, but I find almost all the KDE software outside of that core DE nearly unusable. Except Okular – it's by far the best PDF reader I know. I guess credit goes to Poppler for the heavy lifting [2].

[1] https://okular.kde.org/

[2] https://poppler.freedesktop.org/

Try zathura, if you haven’t. Super fast, and keyboard oriented.

thanks! really cool

I use qpdfview and it works very well.

If pretty sure he's opening it in the browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com