Is there any newer PDF-reader for AmigaOS 3.x than the ancien Apdf from Aminet? It is practically useless for most pdf-filies today...

Regards,

Gregor

@Gregor

Well APDF was a port of XPDF. I suppose that could be recompiled from a newer XPDF branch.

But I wonder if this would be worth it. Except for emulation an Amiga would be too slow to display them. My 800Mhz A1 has struggled for years to render a PDF. And AmiPDF is now old.

A 68K version would be to slow.
But AmiPDF v1.25 runs very well and fast on my Sam460ex.

@Nicsoft
Quote:

But AmiPDF v1.25 runs very well and fast on my Sam460ex.

It's stable and fast but a little outdated. The version date is 2008 and 8 years is a lifetime in Internet terms. I think the latest version of XPDF (which I think AmiPDF is based on) is version 3.04 (2014). OS4 AmiCygnix contains XPDF 3.03 but even that fails with some of the PDFs on the Internet. The problem is that there a number of PDF writing programs that are apparently only tested to work with the Adobe PDF reader; not to meet PDF specifications.

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X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

VPDF could be one option. At least under MorphOS it's MUCH better than APDF 3.4... practically all PDF files I've thrown to VPDF have worked and even printed fine.

There seems to been bounty to port it to AmigaOS (4?), but for some reason it hasn't been progressed. http://www.amigabounty.net/?function=viewproject&projectid=101

Last edited by jPV on 14-Jun-2016 at 10:06 AM.

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I think the OS4 PDF reader works fine. Only issue I have is that it keeps refreshing the page many many many times over when the window is resized. It should stop refreshing if the size if the same, i.e. ignore the last 10-20 refreshes taking up to several minutes in some cases. This is very annoying since it isn't very fast, even on X1000 on some PDFs with images.

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@Gregor

Quote:

Is there any newer PDF-reader for AmigaOS 3.x than the ancien Apdf from Aminet? It is practically useless for most pdf-filies today...

It's OS3 which is outdated :-/

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@elwood
Yes.

@Deniil715
Quote:

I think the OS4 PDF reader works fine. Only issue I have is that it keeps refreshing the page many many many times over when the window is resized. It should stop refreshing if the size if the same, i.e. ignore the last 10-20 refreshes taking up to several minutes in some cases. This is very annoying since it isn't very fast, even on X1000 on some PDFs with images.

That's probably because you have "Prefs/GUI/Controls/Resize window with contents" checkmarked (activated). AmiPDF is constantly rescaling the page when you resize the window because that's what you requested in GUI prefs.

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X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

AmiPDF Works ok in OS4. A port? What is not..

The killer program is comming in the few next two weeks, maybe, maybe not?


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@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Gregor Well APDF was a port of XPDF. I suppose that could be recompiled from a newer XPDF branch.

I would definitely support this idea.

Quote:

Hypex wrote: But I wonder if this would be worth it. Except for emulation an Amiga would be too slow to display them. My 800Mhz A1 has struggled for years to render a PDF. And AmiPDF is now old.

Let me reply to this with an analogy:
Back in 1989-1992 I got educated as a CAD Analyst on a SUN Workstation (Medusa, Cadds4x).

At home I had my 7.14 mHz Amiga 500 with DynaCad (3d CAD).
DynaCad crawled on the 68000 cpu @ 7.14 mHz - but I was glad it worked at all.

This way I could do exercises for school at home.
I even had a tool to convert the data from a 3d-DynaCad-file to an executable CNC-file, store it on a floppy disk, take it to school and load it to our Unix-Cadds4x environment. Then I could send it to our CNC System, where the part was manufactured.

Even if it was really slow - I was glad it worked at all and enabled me to exercise at home.

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Dandy
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If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
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These days, one would use Poppler (a shared library for decoding PDF, and the most accurate free PDF implementation afaik) instead of xpdf. If you don't compile the test programs included in the suite, the list of dependencies is quite short (cairo and libpng/jpeg I think).

One could also try to to contact the AmiPDF author to see if he's willing to release his code - maybe parts of the GUI could be reused.

@dandy:
Quote:

Let me reply to this with an analogy:

Since you don't have to "exercise" reading PDFs or using a PDF reader, I'm not sure what you're getting at. I'm sure nobody would mind having a modern PDF reader on OS3, but "I don't mind" doesn't sound like a good enough reason to have a go at it.

Does AROS have a PDF reader?

@jpv:
Quote:

There seems to been bounty to port it to AmigaOS (4?), but for some reason it hasn't been progressed.

It was the first (and last) bounty after the Timberwolf bounty, which - despite all the assurances that "Timberwolf works fine here" - completely destroyed amigabounty.net.

@elwood

Haven't you heard, 3 is the New 4. That being said, OS 3.x is far from too old.

Drewlio77

@Drewlio77

And with a Vampire accelerator, even the old APDF could work fast enough!

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Fred Booth
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Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
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@Xenic

Quote:

That's probably because you have "Prefs/GUI/Controls/Resize window with contents" checkmarked (activated). AmiPDF is constantly rescaling the page when you resize the window because that's what you requested in GUI prefs.

I'm puzzled. I have an X1000 and a decent sized monitor. I can't think of the last time I didn't operate AmiPDF in other than at full screen. Just now I did see that in Prefs I have Resize with Content checked. I tried to "exercise" AmiPDF to see the difference. Hah. I couldn't get it to reduce in width (much). AmiPDF refused! I just assume that is to make sure the gadgets along the top bar can remain seen.

Maybe I'm just too linear? I open a pdf, read it, then quit it. If I get interrupted, I only iconify it.

Please explain your use of AmiPDF in something other than the above way.

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@ggw

Quote:

Please explain your use of AmiPDF in something other than the above way.

Your mind seems very single-tasking to me

I never use any program in full screen, unless watching a movie (not just a video clip) of camera pictures for the sake of watching pictures (not just searching or swipping through).

A PDF typically contains information about something I need to do, and what I need to do is in another window. Flipping back and forth through various full screens or iconify cycles just causes lack of focus and reduce productivity.

PDF files are particularly bad for full screen viewing since they are typically in portrait format while modern monitors are wide-screen. So complete waste of screen space having a PDF viewer, or Word document, or program source, or anything else that has a natural portrait format displayed in fulls creen on a wide-screen monitor.

I see some people at work or otherwise that keep everything in full screen. All they do all day long is flipping windows, while I keep everything as much side-by-side as possible to maximize productivity across applications.

Multitasking is the future. That's why we have wide-screen monitors. They fit two A4-pages side-by-side. Single-tasking fullscreen should be left to the darkages of the 80's and DOS.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Xenic

Quote:

That's probably because you have "Prefs/GUI/Controls/Resize window with contents" checkmarked (activated). AmiPDF is constantly rescaling the page when you resize the window because that's what you requested in GUI prefs.

Of course I do. Anything else is silly in 2016.

AmiPDF is still stupid for redrawing itself to the same size over and over. All other programs that has a potentially heavy redraw has fixed this and prevent redrawing themselves to the same size: Odyssey, IBrowse, and all otehr MUI programs, MultiView, Annotate (my text editor), Workbench icon windows, etc. etc.

AmiPDF is one of very few apps with heavy redrawing that still haven't implemented this fix.

Code is very simple:
input loop {
if(IDCMP_NEWSIZE) {
if(idcmp.new_window_size == my_window_size) then ignore; else redraw(idcmp.new_window_size);
}
}

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Deniil715

Quote:

Code is very simple:

It ain't, believe me.

Quote:

input loop { if(IDCMP_NEWSIZE) { if(idcmp.new_window_size == my_window_size) then ignore; else redraw(idcmp.new_window_size); } }

That code is broken, it doesn't take account of the fact that the window was resized (tha's what triggered the resize message after all,) and so will have been damaged and *need* redrawing even though it was returned to the same size.

The 'correct' solution to reduce redraws is to set aflag when you recieve the first resize then after processing all messages in that batch, redraw if the flag is set.

ie in pseudo code

while (messages)
{
   case ICMP:
        redraw = TRUE
}
if redraw 
{    
     redraw
} 

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Cant recall who asked, but someone in this thread did.

Yes, AROS does have a PDF reader, AROSPDF, which is based on xpdf. Its about 5 years old, but seems to work with most files (havent found any yet that dont).

People seem to underestimate just how much raw grunt modern pdf files, stacked with images, links, etc. take though. There's plenty that have modest requirements, but some are crazy heavy.

Even an x1000/x5000 would struggle with some files, let alone things like a Vampire board, or real 68k cpu. Given that 68k emulation on a modern x86 system is roughly on par with native ppc on a higher end ppc system, an updated 68k pdf reader wouldnt be a complete waste. Lots of people use winuae, and while amithlon has a much smaller user base it does have more grunt than any other 68k based system, so an updated 68k pdf viewer would be handy there too.

@Deniil715

Easy.... just use a 2nd screen for viewing pdfs and set the pdf documents to display 2 pages per screen, then set the pdf viewer to full screen.
Alternatively, rotate your 2nd monitor at 90 degrees.

You seem to be dismissing pdf based on the fact that if you use them in an 80's/90's type fashion theyre dated....... how about using them in modern fashion? None of your points are valid there. Not one.