Atril is very slow with image-heavy PDF documents

Support & Help Requests
1

When trying to view a PDF that includes hires images (like magazines or books scans), Atril is really slow when compared to what is available on Windows or Android. It can take ~10 seconds to render a single page. The issue is the same with Evince (which isn’t surprising as Atril is a fork).

I came across a message on AskUbuntu about this very same problem with Evince, which suggests other PDF viewers:

  • built-viewer in browsers like Chrome or Firefox: not really handy for everyday usage;
  • qpdfview: still a bit slow (a few seconds to render a page) but quite better;
  • mupdf: really fast, rendering is pretty much instantaneous, but it has no interface and no display options (e.g. can’t auto fit to screen or display two pages side by side).
    I haven’t tried Okular as it wants to install a lot of KDE dependancies. Maybe there are other viewers that I don’t know of.

Is there ayhting that can be done on Atril’s level to make rendering of images faster (tweaks in gconf/dconf, maybe?) or plans to switch the rendering library it uses?

2

Hallo terzag

Why are you worried about installing “a lot of KDE dependencies”? :thinking:

Kate, Okular and K3b are among my must have installs. I wouldn’t be without them. :slight_smile: :penguin:

3

I don’t like to add too much dependancies from another DE, it can clobber config files (with eventual small conflicts), the Applications menu… When it’s just a few libs, I don’t mind but when it starts adding several softwares and daemons (as it’s often the case with KDE apps), I’d rather avoid it.