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)
  • catloaf
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    7 months ago

    Are you relaunching Firefox every time? You could just reload the file by refreshing.

    But I don’t think any viewer is going to support keeping your place in the document when it changes.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
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      7 months ago

      No of course I was just refreshing. The problem is, the UI should stay completely still, just the render should refresh.

      But I don’t think any viewer is going to support keeping your place in the document when it changes.

      Okular does that just fine. Tested with multiple pages.