Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Fresh Evince Package Available

Hi everybody,

As promissed, I have just released a new version of evince package, and this one is the smallest package ever. First of all, as we don't need libgnomeprintui anymore, we save about 2794 KB. Second, I have generated only the dictionaries supported by the device. With this we saved about 885 KB. Total memory saved: 3679 KB. Cool!!! :D

But the most attractive and coolest feature in this version is that you are able to scroll the document using the stylus, just like you do when you use Browser and the default PDF reader.

So for these reasons I strongly recommend you to to download and install this new version. And don't forget to uninstall libgnomeprintui package, unless of course, you have gnumeric installed.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice, thank you, but stil useless for me for reading PDFs. The memory consumption is big problem. With small (900kb) PDF and only evince launched i see memory low dialogs. Can you make configurable how many pages are rendered in advance? 2 (current and next) would be enough, maybe also previous for going one page back if there is still memory for third page. Also one minor glitch - when i zoom and center page and go to next page, the centered position is not remembered and I need to center it againg (in non continuous mode, i thought this mode can take less memory).

etrunko said...

Hi fanoush,

Thank you for your feedback, the memory comsuption is one of the biggest problems in Evince. I will work on some optimizations like you said, less pages in cache, etc. The number of pages in memory is set to 5, and I really agree with you. For 770, we don't need so much pages in cache.

Now, for this zoom issue, I don't know if it is really a bug or an expected behaviour. I will report it to Evince developers and see what we can do about it.

Best Regards, Etrunko

Anonymous said...

Only 5 pages? Evince takes 20-30MB in memory with this PDF. But well, if trimming it from 5 to 2 can halve it to 10-15MB, it would be bearable. It is good there is such setting that can be (easily?) changed. I thought it is too clever (or dumb) and tries to cache whole document everytimes.

Thanks for your work.

etrunko said...

The funny thing is I have tested evince with a Sony DSC-T3 PDF manual, which has a lot of images, 5.6 MB size and 144 pages long with acceptable performance.

Could you please send me the link of this specific file or just mail it for eblima at gmail dot com?

Thanks a lot.

Anonymous said...

http://gpsd.berlios.de/zodiac.pdf

when opened it takes 16MB but when going to next page few times it takes between 22-31MB (RSS column in top)

This was a first random pdf I found via google to test evince. I'll try some others. It may be exception.

Anonymous said...

BTW, I zoomed a bit to fit the text while fullscreen. It looks like when zoomed it takes more memory.

etrunko said...

A good option is create a swap file. The performance increses a lot. Just run the following commands as root (which i found somewhere at maemo-developers archives):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/mmc1/extraswap bs=1024 count=16384
mkswap /media/mmc1/extraswap 16384
swapon /media/mmc1/extraswap

Best Regards, Etrunko

Konttori said...

Do you think it could be viable to also allow support for disabling image rendering as is in the default pdf viewer? It would be nice if that could be possible.

Anonymous said...

Can I get the source for all your libgnomeprint stuff? I would like to try and port other apps to maemo and these libraries are dependancies that lots of other gnome apps have. With the source and your configure and compile instructions, it would be easier to build other ports that reuse your libgnomeprint.deb.

etrunko said...

Hi Joe,

Of course I can send you the source code of libgnomeprintui packages. I will post aa new entry with instructions on how to use them.

Best Regards.

Anonymous said...

Any plans supporting reading of Postscript documents (*.ps)

Sandro Magi said...

I wasn't sure who to contact regarding this, but here's a PDF that is brutally slow when viewed with both the built-in PDF reader and Evince:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/holyer97brisk.html