Re: pdf / ghostscript viewer

[Mark Hamstra <mark hamstra Bentley com>]

On Fri, 06 Feb 1998, Jim Pick wrote:
::
:"Ben 'The Con Man' Kahn" <xkahn@cybersites.com> writes:
:
:> On 6 Feb 1998, Jim Pick wrote:
:> 
:> > Two things I like about acroread - the anti-aliased fonts (very
:> > readable), and the ability to zoom at any scale.  If a gv-like front
:> > end had those features, I'd love it.
:> 
:> Jim,
:> 	Actually, gv has those features.  (Look in the menus for
:> anti-aliasing...  Maybe you need a more recent version of ghostview?)  And
:> zooming?  Try the middle or right mouse button.  I don't remember which.
:> You can zoom to any level.
:
:I guess I knew all that, I should have been more specific in my
:comments.
:
:The anti-aliasing in gv sucks compared to acroread (that's why it's
:not on by default, I guess) - it's like the Win95 excuse for
:anti-aliasing.  Basically, it's such poor quality that it makes things
:harder to read rather than easier.  I like the anti-aliasing in
:acroread - it actually makes stuff in small point sizes readable.

??  I have no idea what you are talking about.  I just fired up gv to try to get
some clue, but my experience is just the oposite of yours: If I drop the zoom 
level down so that text is tiny and illegible without antialiasing, turning on
aliasing makes a huge difference, making the text readable again.  At larger
sizes, gv produces absolutely beautiful text for me. 

:And the zoom feature in gv only works for fixed ratios.  I think it
:could be done a lot better.  

This one I'll agree with.  Much nicer than popping up a window at one of a fixed
selection of zoom levels would be to zoom the selected area to fill the main
window.

:I suppose it's probably primarily a
:limitation of the interface to gs.  It would be nice to see a
:multi-threaded library backend onto gs.  (Maybe dgs does this?)
:
:I still like gv though.

Me too, I couldn't work efectively without it.

--
Mark Hamstra
Bentley Systems, Inc.