OT: Linux PDF Viewers

OT: Linux PDF Viewers

[Hraban]

Hi folks!

It's a bit aside of ConTeXt, but perhaps someone has a hint...

* there's no Acrobat Reader for my PPC-Linux.
* all GS basing viewers cut the pages after 2/3.
* xpdf works best, but doesn't show embedded fonts (strange!)
* most interactive features work only with Acrobat.

Is there a solution?

(Normally I test my PDFs with xpdf, then copy it to a Mac Volume
and view it with Acrobat, but that's a bit nasty.)

Grüßlis vom Hraban!

Re: OT: Linux PDF Viewers

[Tobias Burnus]

Hi Hraban,

> * there's no Acrobat Reader for my PPC-Linux.
Well not entirely true: There is a Java version of it. It is rather
slow, but has some bugs removed which persited in the binaries. (Hans
tested more than I did, but it works too slow if you don't have a fast
system. Else give it a try.)

> * all GS basing viewers cut the pages after 2/3.
What does GhostScript do (gs not gv). I know these kind of problems
(unfortunally gv is no longer maintained), but gs always showed the
correct result. (Get familar with -dFirstPage -r -dLastPage etc. ;-)

> Is there a solution?
Well according to Ralph the new Ghostscript maintainer (besides the
quiet supervisor L. Peter Deutsch) plans to create a Viewer as
(optional) part of Ghostscript which is supposed to do interactive
stuff. (Being himself a Linux user this may only apply to Linux, I think
it should be based on gtk+ (Gnome, Gimp, [Mozilla]), but maybe also on
Qt (KDE, Opera, Borland *).

Another methode which works with X. Login (e.g. via SSH) into another
computer and run it remotely (if you have it somewhere in the local
network (if applicable), via ISDN it isn't so much a fun ;-)

Tobias

Re: OT: Linux PDF Viewers

[George N. White III]

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On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Hraban wrote:

> It's a bit aside of ConTeXt, but perhaps someone has a hint...
> 
> * there's no Acrobat Reader for my PPC-Linux.
> * all GS basing viewers cut the pages after 2/3.
> * xpdf works best, but doesn't show embedded fonts (strange!)
> * most interactive features work only with Acrobat.
> 
> Is there a solution?
> 
> (Normally I test my PDFs with xpdf, then copy it to a Mac Volume
> and view it with Acrobat, but that's a bit nasty.)
> 
> Grüßlis vom Hraban!

When I was running pdftex on an old mono NeXTStation (30 minutes to format
the pdftex manual!) I used an old 486 running linux to test PDF files
on a color display.

Thanks to X, you can point the display to your PPC-Linux screen, so you
can get by with a very basic intel system (worth maybe US$100).

-- 
George N. White III <gnw3@acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography