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Preload pdfs?

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Stratus_ss

Overclockix Snake Charming Senior, Alt OS Content
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Location
South Dakota
Anyone know of a program for linux that allows you to preload the entire pdf file? I am currently reading a rather lengthy PDF and waiting for the pages to load is really irritating.

I have tried Okular, Evince, Xpdf so far, with Okular being the quickest but still leaving some to be desired. I am currently downloading the official adobe one but I like to keep it open source if I can
 
I use kpdf. I like it and I have never had any of the loading problems. Never really tried to open a HUGE pdf but works great for ~60 pages or so. If you are downloading it from the web then thats your bottle neck. If you already have it downloaded then your HDD is slow and you should think about SSD ;). Really not much you can do about it.

I don't think there are any programs that will wait until the PDF is fully loaded before displaying anything. IMO that would be a bad approach in today's multi-threaded world. It should be loading as much as it can in the background allowing the user to scroll through what is already loaded. Then raise the priority of the pages not loaded if you are trying to view them. I would hope eventually it would get the whole thing loaded just give it a few mins. It would be terrible if it only loaded around where you were scrolling and didn't load the other pages until you scrolled to them. Lets just hope no one ever codes something like that.
 
Okular is the best one I've ever used. The official Adobe one, the last time I used it, was slower than any of the oss options.

What is the processor in that computer you are doing this on? Okular gives me no slow downs on my Athlon X2 on graphic heavy PDF's, but my EEE PC is a bit slow.
 
Okular has a "Performance" settings in the config, that if you set to "Aggresive", it preloads pages. It is extremely fast for me.
 
Surprisingly the official Adobe one performed the best

System specs:
core duo (not core 2 duo) 1.86 dual core
4 gigs of ram
160 gig 5400 rpm hdd
Linux Mint 7

I used Okular with aggressive settings, its a close second.
I read a lot of good things about KPDF except it has no install candidates. It was supposed to install with the KDE graphics pack (which is installed) but KPDF is nowhere to be found.

As for waiting to load the pages until you scrolled to them that is EXACTLY what I was running into with Evince which is why I was seeking alternatives. Granted it was the specific PDF because whoever scanned the damn thing scanned it at such a high res that I have to view it at 7% just to have it zoomed out enough to make it readable. This 160 page thing is 380 megs... crikey!
 
Okular may have replaced KPDF. If you use KDE 3.x I think you could still get KPDF but I think Okular is KPDF's successor.
 
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