4 ms·

This has excellent performance, and is incredibly fast. Well done! Mutools is fantastic for PDF I use it as a backup converter when imagemagick fails in my doc

This has excellent performance, and is incredibly fast. Well done! Mutools is fantastic for PDF I use it as a backup converter when imagemagick fails in my document viewer: https://github.com/dosyago/chai https://github.com/dosyago/chai

adrian_b 3y ago
Indeed, this appears to have the same advantage over other viewers as the standalone MuPDF, i.e. much greater rendering and navigating speed. MuPDF is my main PDF viewer, due to its unmatched performance and good full-screen UX, even if I sometimes encounter PDF files that cannot be rendered by MuPDF, when I have to fall back to other viewers, e.g. Okular.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Coming from someone who is clearly in academia / research adjacent (!! judging by your comments) this is high praise!! PDFs are close to currency of the realm. Haha! :)
- Modified3019 3y ago
  The developers of muPDF would likely be interested in the files that are rendered incorrectly so that can be fixed
bramhaag 3y ago
[flagged]
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Hahaha! :) Which words would you have used a thesaurus for? I don't see anything that complex there.
leononame 3y ago
The performance is astonishing. On my underpowered android, the PDF was super smooth. It's miles ahead of other PDF viewers (the worst offender is the Google Docs in browser pdf viewer, it's just horrible on my phone to a point where I refuse to even look at those documents on my phone). Really impressive
hatch_q 3y ago
I don't see it having any better performance than integrated chrome pdf viewer. Furthermore, with it using wasm i'd expected it to have custom renderer, but it's just pdf to html converter. And loading times are quite bad (10 times slower - compared to firefox or chrome pdf viewers).
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Loading the mupdf.js bundle is slow right now. When I checked it out it was super fast. Guess it's a server/ratelimit/caching issue with the HN hug being top of front page. Which is what I guess you mean about 10x slower -- so you're making an unfair comparison as you're counting the network at peak, whereas browser plugins load from disk or memory. But I actually thought the load of the PDF (once the app was loaded) was, for MuPDF.js, slightly faster than the browser plugin. When I watched it, tho I have not benched it. Do you have any benchmarks?
- CryZe 3y ago
  It uses a custom renderer, which seems to just blit its image data onto a canvas. The HTML is just there so you can actually select the text.
  - dsp_person 3y ago
    Does this generally satisfy accessibility needs too?
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  I downloaded this file https://indico.cta-observatory.org/event/5245/contributions/44397/attachments/25675/37613/Markoff_slides.pdf https://indico.cta-observatory.org/event/5245/contributions/... and tried timing how long it took for the standard firefox vs this MuPDF viewer to render the first slide and there is like at least 3 second difference. As others in the thread also report significant speed gains I think you either have some weird issue with your setup or how you measure performance.
supernes 3y ago
This WASM "demo" is literally the only viewer on Windows I've found that can handle documents like the Baldur's Gate 3 Artbook (around 300MB of high-res artworks in PDF format). Native and browser-based viewers all choke even on a decent system with lots of memory.
- remram 3y ago
  Even the MuPDF native app fails?
  - sebras 3y ago
    If that is indeed the case, we'd appreciate a bug report over at https://bugs.ghostscript.com https://bugs.ghostscript.com It is hard to fix issues we don't know about. :)
- Modified3019 3y ago
  I’m curious, have you tried SumatraPDF (uses muPDF under the hood)? https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf
- snvzz 3y ago
  Even okular?
- eviks 3y ago
  That should literally be impossibly surpising Checked Sumatrapdf on Windows and it's better - while on some fast mouse wheel scrolling the web version is more responsive, but then it doesn't adjust text quality, so shows blurry version (though zooming seems to fix it) while the local versionalways shows high quality text (sometimes after a delay) Pageup/down scroll is without a delay locally but it scrolls through blank pages, so I guess mouse scroll just always does quality rendering, thus it's the only operation that's slower locally So while pages load faster in the web version, they are of much worse quality initially
deleted 3y ago
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hn_acker 3y ago
Off-topic: Chai's license seems to be proprietary now. 7 months ago the license was AGPL as given by the LICENSE and README.md files [1][2]. 1 month ago, the LICENSE file was changed to the text of the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 [3], but the README.md still says AGPL. If Chai continues to use MuPDF (AGPL [4]), then isn't Chai's new license contradictory (unless the Chai developers got a license exception from Artifex Software)? [1] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8347bb0cd6d14ed0f2/LICENSE https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8... [2] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8347bb0cd6d14ed0f2/README.md https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8... [3] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/commit/45da5f12ab8a817dc4f7423967ef344b01426268 https://github.com/dosyago/chai/commit/45da5f12ab8a817dc4f74... [4] https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf/blob/master/COPYING
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- keepamovin 3y ago
  Don't worry about it, you're confused, it's okay. Hahahaha! :) AGPL requires you release the source and we do that. As an aside — would be interesting to get Artifex's comment on this — but I'm not even sure it applies as we install the mutool binary via apt, call it from bash, and we don't modify or use their libraries at all. Would this even need to comply with AGPL at all? I don't know. If you'd carried on your search of our source a little bit further, you'd see we use the mutool binary: https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/37c1a1ec0941d81e0d6f8afac068126065bf98ff/scripts/convert.sh#L171 https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/37c1a1ec0941d81e0d6f8af... ; and you also may have discovered what the AGPL means: https://artifex.com/licensing/agpl/ https://artifex.com/licensing/agpl/ Hahahaha! :)
  - lionkor 3y ago
    I would highly suggest you read the actual license text, because its a lot more than "just share the source".

adrian_b 3y ago

Indeed, this appears to have the same advantage over other viewers as the standalone MuPDF, i.e. much greater rendering and navigating speed. MuPDF is my main PDF viewer, due to its unmatched performance and good full-screen UX, even if I sometimes encounter PDF files that cannot be rendered by MuPDF, when I have to fall back to other viewers, e.g. Okular.

keepamovin 3y ago
Coming from someone who is clearly in academia / research adjacent (!! judging by your comments) this is high praise!! PDFs are close to currency of the realm. Haha! :)
Modified3019 3y ago
The developers of muPDF would likely be interested in the files that are rendered incorrectly so that can be fixed

bramhaag 3y ago

[flagged]

keepamovin 3y ago
Hahaha! :) Which words would you have used a thesaurus for? I don't see anything that complex there.

leononame 3y ago

The performance is astonishing. On my underpowered android, the PDF was super smooth. It's miles ahead of other PDF viewers (the worst offender is the Google Docs in browser pdf viewer, it's just horrible on my phone to a point where I refuse to even look at those documents on my phone). Really impressive

hatch_q 3y ago

I don't see it having any better performance than integrated chrome pdf viewer. Furthermore, with it using wasm i'd expected it to have custom renderer, but it's just pdf to html converter. And loading times are quite bad (10 times slower - compared to firefox or chrome pdf viewers).

keepamovin 3y ago
Loading the mupdf.js bundle is slow right now. When I checked it out it was super fast. Guess it's a server/ratelimit/caching issue with the HN hug being top of front page. Which is what I guess you mean about 10x slower -- so you're making an unfair comparison as you're counting the network at peak, whereas browser plugins load from disk or memory. But I actually thought the load of the PDF (once the app was loaded) was, for MuPDF.js, slightly faster than the browser plugin. When I watched it, tho I have not benched it. Do you have any benchmarks?
CryZe 3y ago
It uses a custom renderer, which seems to just blit its image data onto a canvas. The HTML is just there so you can actually select the text.
- dsp_person 3y ago
  Does this generally satisfy accessibility needs too?
SiempreViernes 3y ago
I downloaded this file https://indico.cta-observatory.org/event/5245/contributions/44397/attachments/25675/37613/Markoff_slides.pdf https://indico.cta-observatory.org/event/5245/contributions/... and tried timing how long it took for the standard firefox vs this MuPDF viewer to render the first slide and there is like at least 3 second difference. As others in the thread also report significant speed gains I think you either have some weird issue with your setup or how you measure performance.

supernes 3y ago

This WASM "demo" is literally the only viewer on Windows I've found that can handle documents like the Baldur's Gate 3 Artbook (around 300MB of high-res artworks in PDF format). Native and browser-based viewers all choke even on a decent system with lots of memory.

remram 3y ago
Even the MuPDF native app fails?
- sebras 3y ago
  If that is indeed the case, we'd appreciate a bug report over at https://bugs.ghostscript.com https://bugs.ghostscript.com It is hard to fix issues we don't know about. :)
Modified3019 3y ago
I’m curious, have you tried SumatraPDF (uses muPDF under the hood)? https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf
snvzz 3y ago
Even okular?
eviks 3y ago
That should literally be impossibly surpising Checked Sumatrapdf on Windows and it's better - while on some fast mouse wheel scrolling the web version is more responsive, but then it doesn't adjust text quality, so shows blurry version (though zooming seems to fix it) while the local versionalways shows high quality text (sometimes after a delay) Pageup/down scroll is without a delay locally but it scrolls through blank pages, so I guess mouse scroll just always does quality rendering, thus it's the only operation that's slower locally So while pages load faster in the web version, they are of much worse quality initially

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hn_acker 3y ago

Off-topic: Chai's license seems to be proprietary now. 7 months ago the license was AGPL as given by the LICENSE and README.md files [1][2]. 1 month ago, the LICENSE file was changed to the text of the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 [3], but the README.md still says AGPL. If Chai continues to use MuPDF (AGPL [4]), then isn't Chai's new license contradictory (unless the Chai developers got a license exception from Artifex Software)? [1] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8347bb0cd6d14ed0f2/LICENSE https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8... [2] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8347bb0cd6d14ed0f2/README.md https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/a6b7fb50647ae001185bdc8... [3] https://github.com/dosyago/chai/commit/45da5f12ab8a817dc4f7423967ef344b01426268 https://github.com/dosyago/chai/commit/45da5f12ab8a817dc4f74... [4] https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf/blob/master/COPYING

deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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keepamovin 3y ago
Don't worry about it, you're confused, it's okay. Hahahaha! :) AGPL requires you release the source and we do that. As an aside — would be interesting to get Artifex's comment on this — but I'm not even sure it applies as we install the mutool binary via apt, call it from bash, and we don't modify or use their libraries at all. Would this even need to comply with AGPL at all? I don't know. If you'd carried on your search of our source a little bit further, you'd see we use the mutool binary: https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/37c1a1ec0941d81e0d6f8afac068126065bf98ff/scripts/convert.sh#L171 https://github.com/dosyago/chai/blob/37c1a1ec0941d81e0d6f8af... ; and you also may have discovered what the AGPL means: https://artifex.com/licensing/agpl/ https://artifex.com/licensing/agpl/ Hahahaha! :)
- lionkor 3y ago
  I would highly suggest you read the actual license text, because its a lot more than "just share the source".