[BL] Viewing pdf/ps with svp and lynx

baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org
Sun Mar 11 12:35:11 EDT 2007


Add to the end of lynx.cfg

DOWNLOADER:View pdf/ps with svp/gs: svp -d 1280x1024 -p %s

-a mono -d resolution -p fit page are all optional,
but default 640 can be hard to read


This asks whether to download or cancel, then you get a choice of saving 
to disk, or viewing (with your choice of downloaders if you have others, 
such as image viewers).

It could be set up to display automatically with a VIEWER line, but the 
pdf files I run into on the web are sometimes manuals that I want to save.

You could do something similar for links browser.

You can't do this with xpdf, unless you browse from within X.

xpdf displays only postscript.

Xvesa does mono only at 640, which is not very legible.

BL2 - glibc 2.2.6 figures:

xpdf - 7.8MB plus Xvesa 869K plus libX11 767K plus xinit 11K
svp - 27K plus libvga.so.1 370K latest version (330K second-latest)
svp-static for libvga is about 400K

They both also use libc libm ld-linux.

Memory requirements to view a sample file (mono file) offline:

 	640 mono 	800	1024/1280    640mono 1280 mono 8-bit 
xpdf				          svp
Xvesa	8.8MB          11.9MB     11.7MB      1.1MB      1.3MB  5.8MB
(Yes, 640 and 800 use more memory for xpdf)


Text is illegible at 640, so a practical comparison would be about
11.7MB for xpdf vs 1.3MB for svp/gs to view a mono document.

xmono server is 2MB (larger than Xvesa) but might take up less RAM

xpdf took 3 sec (at 1.2GHz) to load a file here that svp did nearly 
instantly, then they both took about 1 sec to go between pages, but xpdf 
does this much more slowly on a slower computer.  I will test svp on a 
100MHz laptop with 12MB RAM.

svp uses gs briefly, then gs exits from memory.
svgalib takes up no RAM, X does (xinit and Xvesa).



gs at 1280-24bit without a front end produces something illegible in 5MB.
There are X frontends for gs (gsv), which would probably use less RAM than 
xpdf.

If you are really short of RAM you can print the document (while online).
Instead of using gs you can convert pdftoppm (3.2MB) then print with 
netpbm (200K or so).  gs is about 3MB (less with less devices) plus fonts.


Sindi



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