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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

I love PDFs. I hate Acrobat.

I used to feel that way until Acrobat 8 because Acrobat was always so slow. However, versions 8 and 9 open PDF files much faster and are more reliable than previous versions, so I don't see the point of the alternative PDF viewers any more.

I love xpdf.

Evince is fine for me. What does xpdf do that Evince doesn't?

It has a smaller footprint, if that matters to you.

xpdf has better anti-aliasing in my computers, usually. Pdfs from jstor for example look awful under evince and ok on xpdf.

I haven't heard of xpdf or evince before and have been using foxit, how does this compare?

While I haven't used them in direct comparison, it is worth noting that Evince is shipped with GNOME in nearly all GNOME-based Linux distributions, and xpdf has the added bonus of not relying on a specific toolkit. Mind, you can certainly use Evince outside of GNOME, but people have their own reasons for avoiding such things.

The bottom line is that both work acceptably well, and do so much better than Adobe's own offerings in my experience.

Evince will use the anti-aliasing option that Gnome does, including a couple of different flavors of subpixel rendering.

Yes, and it works marvellously for most fonts, but I think it doesn't do anti aliasing for bitmapped fonts, and xpdf does. I could send you a screenshot of how badly jstor pdfs get in my laptop, if you're interested.

No need, consider me educated.

Evince chokes up on large PDFs but xpdf does not. I started using xpdf to read PDFs in OLPC, due to necessity. I liked it so much that I'm using it in my dev laptop as well. It is faster too.

Odd, I've been using Evince all today to read a 772 page PDF of 'Solaris 10: The Complete Reference' (yes, I read textbooks, yes I'm also aware of how piss poor Solaris is).

It handles the document fine, including generating thumbnails for all the pages on the fly as I scroll down.

I think the difference is significant when you are RAM poor. It made a huge difference for me on OLPC. May be you have lots of RAM?

Evince has 19.5MB resident when loading the document, which seems reasonable for an average desktop, but I don't know how much RAM OLPC has.

No bad at all! OLPC RAM = 256 MB.

Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.

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