8mo ago

Best auto-reload supported smooth PDF Viewer?

Hey people! I want to learn typst, a modern alternative to LaTeX written in Rust.

Typst can incrementally compile the files to PDF.

Ironically, there is no incrementally refreshing PDF viewer afaik. So for direct visual output of my progress, I would like the fastest, smoothest PDF viewer.

Firefox loads too slow
Okular fast (thanks for the tips guys), just flickering scrollbar and background icon

It can be as small and minimal for that task as possible.

Priorities:

No flicker (no text re-alignment, no disappearing scroll bars, no changing UI)
Fast refresh
Smooth text refresh (maybe with a fade in)
Generally solid

To test:

evince / GNOME Document viewer
atril
mupdf
zathura
gv

Barebones:

Somehow monitor for changes

pipdf (GTK4, but unmaintained)
pdf_render (very minimal, maintained)
pdf2pwg (needs cargo add and cargo build, only A4 pages which seems totally sufficient)
pdf_renderer (security focused, pure Rust, may crash, incomplete)

24 comments

I use zathura for that. It's very minimal and one can use vim keybindings for navigation which I like

If by "nonremovable popup" in Okular, you mean that little toast-like notification in the top-left, that can be turned off in Settings → Configure Okular... → General → "Show hints and info messages".
Not sure, what you mean by "dancing text". I'm using Okular for my Lilypond escapades, which is basically Latex for sheet music, so not a ton of text that could be dancing, but well, it doesn't.
You might be able to improve Okular's (text rendering) speed by tweaking the settings in Settings → Configure Okular... → Performance...
- This is the flicker I meant
  Thanks for the tip about the dialog! I will add that to the FR as a solution. It is not good to generally disable all warnings though.
  
  Ah, it does look like that for me, too. Yeah, the Okular icon is a bit weird there...

I use the Gnome document viewer, and every time I recompile it automatically refreshes and keeps position etc. I compile with $ luatex <myfile.tex>, not sure if that matters.
- I have tried that too, but not for this task. Well packaged, so I will compare it.
  You know, I am looking for something that doesnt flicker, at all.
  
  I don't know about flicker, since I only recompile once in a while.

pulsar (atom successor) is great for it, vscodium should do it, evince (gnome pdf viewer) works good.
What nonremovable popup a d dancing text in okular?
- Right, forgot about Pulsar. Also have Lapce installed but that may not have the needed tools.
  VSCodium also installed in a Distrobox, but tbh I dont want to use it. It is slow, Electron, Microsoft etc. Just not an option.
  I am currently trying to add syntax highlighting for typst to kate, but I read that XML and damn thats complex.
  
  apparently there is a preview plugin for kate https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kate/kate-application-plugin-preview.html , it's already preinstalled. It works with markdown files, I guess if someone would be down, he could extend the plugin to work with typst

I think Evince and Atril have a setting for that? Or was it mupdf? Else you could script something with inotifywait or watch.
Btw, just googled it, less automatically uses lesspipe with pdftotext, so watch -n 2 less your.pdf works. Then there's fbpdf and fbgs of fbi.
- Could you explain? less would just monitor the binary PDF for changes and then pass that to any viewer?
  I think this is really helpful for barebones renderers, thanks! That will be a very good piece of the puzzle for a minimal PDF reader for this task
  
  No, less has the LESSOPEN variable, which can be used to run input-preprocessors. lesspipe misuses that to run specific tools with specific mimetypes, in this case pdftotext for pdf files. It's basically equivalent to running pdftotext -layout <file.pdf> | less. Though no images, for that the other tools.

Btw that mockup paper is hillarious XD

I know gv can auto-reload, though not sure if it's any faster or less flickery than evince or mupdf. Maybe worth testing.

You might be interested in https://mupdf.com/wasm/demo/index.html?file=../../docs/mupdf_explored.pdf, as I've seen people recommend this for large PDFs that would lag out even native viewers. I don't know about flickering though as I haven't tried it out much.

Are you relaunching Firefox every time? You could just reload the file by refreshing.
But I don't think any viewer is going to support keeping your place in the document when it changes.
- No of course I was just refreshing. The problem is, the UI should stay completely still, just the render should refresh.
  But I don't think any viewer is going to support keeping your place in the document when it changes.
  Okular does that just fine. Tested with multiple pages.

24 comments