Re: [Groff] groff performance in respect to hardware platform

[James K. Lowden]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2016 11:04:55 +0000
Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:

> It probably won't be to your taste, but try mupdf(1) to see how
> snappily a PDF can be rendered compared to Okular.  

Interesting.  A little OT for this list, but mupdf appears to me to be 
just a tad faster than xpdf.  

My usual setup is a Mac laptop using remote X over ssh logged into a
NetBSD or Linux machine via wifi.  Most applications -- emacs, xterm,
email -- work just fine that way; after all at 1 MB/s the wifi is better
than Ethernet was when X was designed, and of course computers are
orders of magnitude faster.  

PDF viewers are not in the "just fine" category.  Although xpdf and
mupdf exhibit different "painting" patterns, both take 1-2 seconds to
display a page.  My theory: client-side font-rendering means the page
is displayed a pixel at a time.  

> Unfortunately, it doesn't watch the file, needing an `r' to reload.
> A shame, as a SIGUSR1 would do.

mupudf answers to SIGHUP, which is odd for a non-daemon process,
although as a read-only process I suppose it doesn't matter much what
it does with a real HUP signal.  How would SIGUSR1 be any different?
Simplest is probably just to stat the name every second and reload when
something changes.  

--jkl