acroread on the amd64

[Oliver Fromme]

Ernst W. Winter <ewinter at ewinter.org> wrote:
 > On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > Acroread is a _lot_ faster than those, especially with
 > > anti-aliasing enabled.  I've had a complex document
 > 
 > As I said I don't know as I never needed nor used it.
 > 
 > > (containing lots of detailed maps and graphics) which
 > > gv took more than two minutes to render, while Acroread
 > > took 10 seconds.  Also, I've had several cases where
 > 
 > Please send me some as I never had any problems with that either, so
 > it would be nice to see it and gain the experience.

Something which I've been using a lot recently:  The new
public transport map of munich.  You can download it here:
http://www.mvv-muenchen.de/web4archiv/objects/download/1/vlp_041212_stadt.pdf

For a short test, zoom into the center of the city (so that
the blue rectangle in the center is displayed full-screen).
Acroread finishes after 18 seconds on my machine, gv takes
several minutes.  (This is on a remote X connection which
is tunneled through ssh, using 1280 x 1024 pixels at 32 bit
truecolor.  Using a local X server and/or lower resolution
or lower color-depth should be faster, I guess.)

But also simple documents make a difference.  This is a
4-page flyer from Sandisk that I looked at recently:
http://www.sandisk.com/pdf/retail/retail-product-info-guide.pdf

Acroread displays each page in about 2 to 3 seconds (full-
screen), while gv takes about 7 to 8 seconds.

 > > gv etc. did not render a document properly, most of the
 > > time it had to do with overlapping elements which were
 > > rendered in the wrong order.  Acroread has never any
 > > such problems.
 > 
 > Again, it would be nice to see it as I said I never had such
 > problems, so please enlighten me or send me something so I can see
 > what you mean and which type of documents.

I don't have one at hand right now (and I don't feel like
testing all of my collected PDF files with gv), but there
definitely have been such cases.  In the worst case, gv
ends up with an empty page (or a page that is all red or
whatever), because it paints the background last.

Uhm, I think this is getting somewhat off-topic here.  :-)

But anyway, it would be very nice to have Linux/i386 compa-
tibility working on FreeBSD/amd64 so that Acroread, Opera
and others can be used.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"... there are two ways of constructing a software design:  One way
is to make it so simple that there are _obviously_ no deficiencies and
the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no _obvious_
deficiencies."        -- C.A.R. Hoare, ACM Turing Award Lecture, 1980