handling pdfs?

[soralx at cydem.org]

> > I'm not sure why, maybe I have too poor a font selection here, but
> > the fonts, I mean, the onscreen fonts that xpdf seems to choose,
> > always seems to run characters together, so it gets hard to read
> > them.  So, xpdf wouldn't be my first choice.  I use kpdf to view
> > pdfs for that particular reason, and onthe same document, kpdf does
> > a distinctly better job,  If kpdf uses xpdf's engine, then it must
> > find some way to pick better fonts for itself, it actually does
> > look better.
> 
> I personally find that xpdf looks OK.

Same here, though I do remember to have that cramped characters problem
before. I think it was in PDFs created by OpenOffice swriter. When I
used the "other" OS to print these PDFs, there were cramped characters
on paper.

BTW, 'tis slightly off-topic, but had anyone else noticed that xpdf is
rather slow in rendering pages? I remember, when I had a chance to
use that "other" OS, there was some program to view PDF --
AcrobatReader it was called, AFAIR -- well, that thing rendered pages
almost instantly.

> I avoid things like kpdf because I don't use KDE and don't really need
> all the bloat associated with it. But that's just me.

No, that's not just you. That KDE and GNOME bloat is getting barely
tolerable already. And not only because of the weight -- instability and
departure from UNIX/XFree conventions are driving me crazy (did you
notice that copying text to buffer by selecting it with a mouse doesn't
seem to work anymnore with GTK?). Still, how can it be that just
starting an app should waste tens of seconds of your time and more RAM
than necessary? And that's on a dual-core 2GHz machine! Who would have
imagined...

[SorAlx]  ridin' VS1400