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)
  • Ephera
    6·
    8 months ago

    If by “nonremovable popup” in Okular, you mean that little toast-like notification in the top-left, that can be turned off in Settings → Configure Okular… → General → “Show hints and info messages”.

    Not sure, what you mean by “dancing text”. I’m using Okular for my Lilypond escapades, which is basically Latex for sheet music, so not a ton of text that could be dancing, but well, it doesn’t.
    You might be able to improve Okular’s (text rendering) speed by tweaking the settings in Settings → Configure Okular… → Performance…

      • Ephera
        2·
        8 months ago

        Ah, it does look like that for me, too. Yeah, the Okular icon is a bit weird there…

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
          1·
          8 months ago

          Like, performancewise, why would you render an image in between 2 renders?

          Or I suppose that may be a placeholder canvas with the icon.

          Still, this is a stopper for future smooth transitions.