Re: Improving DocView quality for PDFs?

[Neal Becker]

Kristoffer Balintona wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 13 2024, Neal Becker wrote:
> 
>> Kristoffer Balintona wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> Interesting.  I'm also trying pdf-tools.  But how do I know if emacs is
>> using it?
>>
> 
> Well, the pdf-tools repository[1] details the installation procedure
> well: you should call `M-x pdf-tools-install'. After that, you can open
> up a PDF and its major mode should be `pdf-view-mode'.
> 
> If it isn't already in that mode but works if you directly invoke `M-x
> pdf-view-mode', then it'll probably be a problem with your config.
> 
> Footnotes:
> [1] 
> [https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-pdf-tools-elisp-code
> 

Thanks!  Now I got it!  I was confused because my OS (Fedora) has a package 
called pdf-tools, which is something different.