Hey people! I want to learn typst, a modern alternative to LaTeX written in Rust.

screenshot

Typst can incrementally compile the files to PDF.

Ironically, there is no incrementally refreshing PDF viewer afaik. So for direct visual output of my progress, I would like the fastest, smoothest PDF viewer.

It can be as small and minimal for that task as possible.

Priorities:

  1. No flicker (no text re-alignment, no disappearing scroll bars, no changing UI)
  2. Fast refresh
  3. Smooth text refresh (maybe with a fade in)
  4. Generally solid

To test:

  • evince / GNOME Document viewer
  • atril
  • mupdf
  • zathura
  • gv

Barebones:

Somehow monitor for changes

  • pipdf (GTK4, but unmaintained)
  • pdf_render (very minimal, maintained)
  • pdf2pwg (needs cargo add and cargo build, only A4 pages which seems totally sufficient)
  • pdf_renderer (security focused, pure Rust, may crash, incomplete)
  • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
    3·
    7 months ago

    I think Evince and Atril have a setting for that? Or was it mupdf? Else you could script something with inotifywait or watch.

    Btw, just googled it, less automatically uses lesspipe with pdftotext, so watch -n 2 less your.pdf works. Then there’s fbpdf and fbgs of fbi.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      7 months ago

      Could you explain? less would just monitor the binary PDF for changes and then pass that to any viewer?

      I think this is really helpful for barebones renderers, thanks! That will be a very good piece of the puzzle for a minimal PDF reader for this task

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
        2·
        7 months ago

        No, less has the LESSOPEN variable, which can be used to run input-preprocessors. lesspipe misuses that to run specific tools with specific mimetypes, in this case pdftotext for pdf files. It’s basically equivalent to running pdftotext -layout <file.pdf> | less. Though no images, for that the other tools.