[ On Friday, July 23, 2004 at 16:31:15 (-0700), Jeremy C. Reed wrote: ]
> Subject: three acroread packages and acroread should be acroread4? And choosing PDF viewer?
>
> By the way, what PDF viewers do you like?

none?  :-)

(though of course I restrict myself to only the open-source alternatives)

> xpdf sometimes doesn't display characters -- and shows small squares.
> xpdf provides X selection support (copy to paste elsewhere).

Hmmm... I didn't know it could do that!  cool!

> xpdf doesn't allow printing to a file.
> Uses motif.

+ xpdf sort of understands document structure

+ xpdf sort of supports document internal links

- xpdf is extremely slow, even when no images are present

- xpdf has some trouble with slightly distorted


> gv displays fine. But not copy. Can choose what pages to print or save.

- gv displays PDF reasonably well as long as there are no images (unless
  you have all day....)  not that xpdf is any faster of course.....

- gs (and thus gv) is pretty much totally useless for PDFs on 64-bit (at
  least for little-endian systems like NetBSD/alpha).

- gv doesn't understand internal document links

- gv doesn't understand document structure

- gv/gs gets very confused over page bounding boxes, and often odd-size
  or odd-orientation documents can never be fully displayed

- gv/gs cannot successfully print odd-sized documents to a standard
  postscript printer

- gv doesn't deal with 8-bit depth (or 1-bit) displays very well


> ggv2 is a nicer interface than gv. It uses gnome and appears nicer to me.

It's very hard to describe anything using gnome as having "a nicer
interface", even ignoring the horrible bloat.  :-/

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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