PDF viewers capable of high zoom factors

[Pigeon]

I have a map of the British mainland as a .pdf file. In order to see
useful local details on it, I want to be able to zoom in by about 50x.
I have tried xpdf, gv, ghostview and kghostview, but nothing appears
to be able to zoom in more than 10x.

The solution that occurs to me is to hack the source of one of these
apps to enable higher zoom factors, but before doing this I thought I
would ask and see if anyone knows of a simpler solution - like a more
flexible app, or converting the .pdf to PostScript and performing some
hack on the PostScript which my knowledge of PostScript (zero)
prevents me from thinking of.

Any suggestions?

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[Mark C]

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 14:23, Pigeon wrote:
I have a map of the British mainland as a .pdf file. In order to see

> useful local details on it, I want to be able to zoom in by about 50x.
> I have tried xpdf, gv, ghostview and kghostview, but nothing appears
> to be able to zoom in more than 10x.

Have you tried gpdf?

I'm not sure if it would zoom in enough, but I just tried it and zoom ed
in till I only and 3 words fill up the entire view

You cannot loose much (not sure if its available in testing yet though)

or maybe acroread?

try:

deb [url]http://marillat.free.fr/[/url] unstable main

> Any suggestions?

See above :)

Hope that helps

Mark


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[Marc Wilson]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 11:42:15PM +0100, Mark C wrote:

> Have you tried gpdf?

Are Gnome applications still supposed to do stuff like this?

rei $ gpdf LJ1300.pdf

(gpdf:20471): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: file gdk-pixbuf-io.c: line 729
(gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file): assertion `filename != NULL' failed

(gpdf:20471): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: file gdk-pixbuf-io.c: line 729
(gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file): assertion `filename != NULL' failed

Simple little two page PDF describing a printer.


I thought assertions were... bad. :)

To make this topical, gpdf supports a zoom several orders of magnitude
larger than xpdf does on the same file. ^_^

(/me goes and removes all the Gnome cruft gpdf brought along)

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[email]msw@cox.net[/email] |


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[Michael Heironimus]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 09:04:59PM -0700, Marc Wilson wrote:

> Are Gnome applications still supposed to do stuff like this?
>
> rei $ gpdf LJ1300.pdf
>
> (gpdf:20471): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: file gdk-pixbuf-io.c: line 729
> (gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file): assertion `filename != NULL' failed
>
> (gpdf:20471): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: file gdk-pixbuf-io.c: line 729
> (gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file): assertion `filename != NULL' failed
>
> Simple little two page PDF describing a printer.
>
>
> I thought assertions were... bad. :)

Assertions aren't always bad, they're like any other debug message. No,
GNOME applications probably shouldn't do this, but yes, the overwhelming
majority of GNOME applications I have used over the past several years
spew garbage like this constantly while otherwise working perfectly. KDE
apps tend to go to the opposite extreme and fail without any useful
error messages, unless there's no X session or something.

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Michael Heironimus


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[Joerg Rossdeutscher]

Hi,

Am Mon, 2003-06-30 um 15.23 schrieb Pigeon:

> I have a map of the British mainland as a .pdf file. In order to see
> useful local details on it, I want to be able to zoom in by about 50x.
> I have tried xpdf, gv, ghostview and kghostview, but nothing appears
> to be able to zoom in more than 10x.

Since _every_ application I know for opening pdf is having such a
limitation I would expect this to be a general limitation of pdf. Don't
know, just thinking about.

I'd suggest you rescale the pdf to maximum size with gs and use the new
file instead.

Bye,
Ratti

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[Pigeon]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 11:42:15PM +0100, Mark C wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 14:23, Pigeon wrote:
> I have a map of the British mainland as a .pdf file. In order to see

> > useful local details on it, I want to be able to zoom in by about 50x.
> > I have tried xpdf, gv, ghostview and kghostview, but nothing appears
> > to be able to zoom in more than 10x.

>
> Have you tried gpdf?
>
> I'm not sure if it would zoom in enough, but I just tried it and zoom ed
> in till I only and 3 words fill up the entire view
>
> You cannot loose much (not sure if its available in testing yet though)

I'm using woody, so it's not very practical unfortunately... seems to
involve either backporting it to gnome 1.x or backporting gnome 2 to
woody... think I'll give that one a miss!

> or maybe acroread?
>
> try:
>
> deb [url]http://marillat.free.fr/[/url] unstable main

s/un// in my case... (installs it)...

Well, that's interesting - I have been avoiding acroread because I'm
not keen on it under Windoze. Having installed it more or less as a
last resort, I find that not only does it have adequate zoom
capability for my map, it's a lot faster than the Windoze version.
I've installed acroread 5 under Windoze and quickly uninstalled it and
gone back to version 4 because 5 is painfully slow, but in Linux this
is not the case.

It's also a lot faster than the abovementioned free tools, which tend
to sit there for a long time using 100% CPU and thrashing swap when
trying to read this file - at a guess, this would be because all the
free tools are using gs to process the entire document and then opening
a window onto the result, whereas acroread is just processing enough to
display what's visible in the window. The fact that acroread pans
slowly and uses a lot of CPU when panning, whereas the free tools pan
quickly using little CPU, seems to support this.

Thanks - I'm working now!

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