Re: Improving DocView quality for PDFs?

[Kristoffer Balintona]

On Mon, Oct 07 2024, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Hi, I like viewing PDFs inside Emacs using DocView, but the quality is 
> noticeable lower than in Evince. It looks blocky, like it needs aliasing or 
> something. Could I improve this with some setting changes? I see some 
> variables like Doc View Ghostscript Options but I don't know what options I 
> need to pass in. I see some discussions about this on the Internet but they 
> are very old discussions with unclear guidance.
>
> I am running GNU Emacs 30.0.91 (build 10, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 
> 3.24.41, cairo version 1.18.0) of 2024-10-04.

Hi,

Have you given pdf-tools
(https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#about-pdf-tools)
a go yet? If you haven't heard of it, I think this is the go-to Emacs
PDF viewer for many users because it is very fast and supports many
features that non-Emacs PDF viewers support, like making and viewing
annotations as well as jumping to different points in a document's
outline (though that requires certain metadata to be present in the
document).

If you want to stick with the built-in DocView, I don't have any tips
there since I use pdf-tools's pdf-view-mode in place of it.

-- 
Take care,
Kristoffer