Re: My (ongoing) analysis of the proposed modules

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 09:26:44PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
[...]
> |gpdf
> [lean yes, but would love to see it done better, from a UI perspective]
> 
> <snip jeff's comments>
> 
> It seems that the plans for integration into a viewer-type app have bit
> the dust. This is a shame, but that's life. 
> 
> Pros:
> *renders pdfs really well, which we need
> 
> Cons: 
> *honest question: would keeping it out be a good stick/carrot for
> getting a 'real' image browser in 2.6?

I use PDFs a lot, both creating them and reading a lot of
specifications, so I made a serious attempt to solely use gpdf for a
week at work. Have people really compared it to xpdf properly?

Currently, gpdf blends in better with GNOME, but it is significantly
slower (startup time and per-page rendering time, so reading a document
is slower) and is less functional than xpdf (in particular navigation
via links is non-existent in gpdf -- which is the only effective way to
navigate some documents).  The maintainer is aware of both of these and
has some ideas about the speed thing, but they are both significant
flaws. I think it is a nice application, but it is not a replacement for
xpdf yet. Doesn't that mean it is not yet desktop-worthy?

Malcolm

-- 
Many are called, few volunteer.