Evince pdf reader (with poppler-glib cairo)

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rych
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Evince pdf reader (with poppler-glib cairo)

Post#1 by rych » 24 Nov 2021, 10:15

Please share if you happen to have a latest evince module. If not, I'm going to try to make it myself. Some dependencies I might already have through the qpdfview module qpdfview. But it probably introduces some new dependencies, the most interesting being poppler-glib -- and that's why I want to try evince against qpdfview that uses poppler-qt5. Apparently the poppler developers have made a bizarre decision to use an outdated Splash backend in their Qt5 version and a superior renderer Cairo in poppler-glib and hence in Evince. At least until recently that was the case: https://fitzcarraldoblog.wordpress.com/ ... pdf-files/ Indeed I have to admit that PDF font rendering in qpdfview has been quite bad -- I have tolerated it telling myself that fonts rendering have to be awful in Linux, but no more -- it's 2021!

Hopefully someone would join me on this esoteric quest for a better PDF font rendering.

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ncmprhnsbl
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Evince pdf reader (with poppler-glib cairo)

Post#2 by ncmprhnsbl » 24 Nov 2021, 12:08

try this one: evince-3.36.5.xzm 1.7 mb md5sum: 352ad044ef7ff488214d184ae2bafdf9
it's one fulalas made a while back, havn't tested it recently...
pretty sure poppler-glib is already present (as part of the poppler package)
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rych
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Evince pdf reader (with poppler-glib cairo)

Post#3 by rych » 27 Nov 2021, 04:53

ncmprhnsbl, thank you. Evince is perhaps ever so slightly better than qpdfview at rendering PDF fonts particularly at small zoom levels. Maybe it's doing subpixel rendering better or not trying to do it wrong at least. But the most superior I've seen so far on Linux is not even Acrobat, but PDF-XChange Editor, of course through wine.

Actually I have a system-wide font rendering question for you: changing Font settings in Customize Look and Feel doesn't seem to have any effect or leave a trace in any configuration files, at least $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf isn't even created -- and the Settings mostly are returned to the same defaults when I revisit that GUI

So if I wanted to play with font rendering settings (Antialiasing, Hinting, Sub-pixel), how would I do it manually?

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