Display complex PDF documents with MuPDF
PDF on Steroids
PDFs with many hundreds of pages and equal numbers of images can easily bring PDF viewers such as Okular or Evince to their knees. In contrast, MuPDF puts even the thickest digital tomes on your screen in the blink of an eye.
You might be familiar with this situation: You want to view a PDF document, but as soon as you load it or you try to view the first page on less than state-of-the-art hardware, your favorite PDF viewer slows to a crawl. Even a modicum of scrolling in the document totally overtaxes the system.
This typically happens with PDF documents containing a large number of pages and many charts and images. The PDF viewers typically delivered with a Linux distribution (e.g., Evince or Okular) soon reach their limits. In such cases, it's time to switch to MuPDF [1]. This lean and powerful document viewer displays not only PDF-formatted documents but also XPS, OpenXPS, and CBZ files.
The Contenders
MuPDF's appearance may be a little plain, but even rendering large PDF files is unlikely to faze the tool (Figure 1). MuPDF does not just scroll quickly through documents that are difficult to render, it also displays the content in a far crisper way than its competitors. The test object in our lab was the art e-book Radiant Identities by US photographer Jock Sturges [2]. On Debian and Fedora, I used the PDF viewers Okular, Evince, Xpdf, and QPDF in addition to MuPDF. The hardware in the lab was a well-equipped workstation and – for comparison's sake – an entry-level laptop by HP.
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