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FlaxPDF

FlaxPDF is a fast, nice multithreaded PDF viewer for the desktop.

As long as there are more pages than cores, every core will get a workout.

Light on dependencies, trimming borders, and aggressive caching are its major points. Okular and Evince are nice but heavy; and the point for starting this project, ePDFview, is dead.

EPDFview was nice and light, but lacking in a couple ways:

  • no caching, if you wanted to backtrack one page, it reloaded slowly

  • no automatic zoom to content/trim

Now with my main PDF viewer being dead, why not build a fresh one with those two itches scratched?

Requirements

Poppler, LZO, and FLTK 1.3.

Comparison

Evince 3.10.3, FlaxPDF 0.6.1 and ePDFview 0.1.8 were tested. The same document was scrolled repeatedly to check the cpu usage, the binary size was measured, as well as RAM use.

		CPU		RAM		Binary
Evince		90%		56.8 MB		507 KB (evince + libpdfdocument.so)
ePDFView	72%		46.3 MB		124 KB
FlaxPDF		57% (5% *)	36.5 MB		45 KB

  • To be fair to all, these measurements were done using the Vesa driver. FlaxPDF, as the only one of the three, is able to take advantage of the GPU, dropping its CPU use when scrolling to 5% (tested on radeon).