[Kde-graphics-devel] KPdf evolution

[Zack Rusin]

On Sunday 13 February 2005 12:56, Enrico Ros wrote:
> - How can be a new generation EBOOK reader (yes, 'cause kpdf can
> support many formats, not only pdf, despite of its name) ??
> - What can a program offer you to help you reading / browsing through
> your documents ?? { Translation of text, Google-like indexing,
> Summarizing, Page painting, Animations, OpenGL 3D book-like view,
> Brain content injectors, Retinal Beamers } ? :-) Maybe something
> more?

I love KPdf but there's one thing that bothers me and it's really 
related to xpdf and it's the rendering speed of any pdf's with images. 
When it's all text, everything is fine but when you hit an image the 
drawPixel calls are killing it. An example of a simple presentation is 
at: http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/pbuffers2.pdf. Notice how the cpu jumps 
to 100% on both startup and scrolling. I usually compile/run simulation 
on my machine in the background so having a document viewer taking so 
many cycles.
So essentially, I think that before tackling the really cool features we 
could focus on performance. I'm willing to work on that because it's 
the last thing that bothers me a lot. The big question is how do we 
want to fix it? Improving the xpdf image rendering can be done by 
either porting the drawing code to Qt and then optimizing like any 
other Qt app/lib (which would probably kill the freedesktop xpdf 
initiative) or trying to simply improve the Xpdf drawing code.
Opinions?


Zack

-- 
With Windows Millenium MS was able to get the boot time down to 25 
seconds.
That's almost as short as it's uptime.