I’ve been using evince to open PDFs. But for larger PDFs it is quite laggy, for selecting the text and stuff like that. Is this just a limitation of my computer, or are there faster alternatives to evince?

  • OzoneGameDev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    you should try papers. it’s a new app that’ll replace evince as the default document viewer for gnome in a future version. it’s still in development but i’ve been using it for a long time and it’s really good.

    • ClownsInSpace2@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      Do you feel like it improves on evince in any way? I saw it a while back but it didn’t look too different imo

    • a14o@feddit.org
      2·
      12 hours ago

      I should add that Zathura comes with a minimal graphical interface and you sort of need to learn the vi-like keyboard controls (or look them up with man zathura). But boy is it fast!

  • FOSS Unleashed@social.linux.pizza
    2·
    13 hours ago

    @karet I’ve found zathura+mupdf is very quick and snappy. Poppler (the PDF library most things use, and Zathura can use it too) is ungodly slow. page (from plan9port) is also quite fast (it uses its own PDF code) but I’m not sure what level of compatibility it has.

    • karetOP
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Thanks a lot! Just installed it, and it is significantly faster. But it appears there’s no support for highlighting text. Is there like a plugin or something like that I can install?

      • FOSS Unleashed@social.linux.pizza
        1·
        13 hours ago

        @karet Zathura is meant to be very minimal, I don’t even know if it has plugins (other than for loading other file formats, like epub). If you’re wanting something more GUIey, Firefox (and thus Librewolf) has PDF.js support by default, and I’ve found that to be performant as well.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    21·
    13 hours ago

    I feel like this is just a thing with PDF viewers that don’t paginate their views properly. Try LibreOffice or Xournal as a test to see if they perform better. I never have a problem.