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 addandcargo build, only A4 pages which seems totally sufficient) - pdf_renderer (security focused, pure Rust, may crash, incomplete)
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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...
Like, performancewise, why would you render an image in between 2 renders?
Or I suppose that may be a placeholder canvas with the icon.
Still, this is a stopper for future smooth transitions.