19 ms·

The actual alternative is EPUBs

by SSLy 2y ago

lxgr 2y ago
I love ePub, but I also have to admit that the viewer experience for non-books is really not quite there yet. Most viewers on iOS, macOS, Linux and Android that I've tried are very tied to the idea of all ePubs being ebooks and insist on managing them in their own library, don't optimize latency to first page rendered (because they usually index and cache a bunch of stuff for a "newly opened book", assuming you'll be reading it over the course of days/weeks) etc. For example, on macOS, the default app associated with ePub is Apple Books, but to be able to use technical papers in ePub format, I really need something like Preview.app (and that doesn't support them). (In that way, the situation is very similar to JPEG XL: macOS supports them in quick view, but only Safari can actually open them...)
- cess11 2y ago
  Did you try muPDF?
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Is that available for macOS? I can't seem to find a recent release.
    - SSLy 2y ago
      https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mupdf#default https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mupdf#default
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Thank you! Not sure how it is supposed to look like on other OSes, but this is barely a GUI application on macOS. (I have to launch it from the command line, UI and text rendering are extremely pixelated etc.) It's definitely not up to par with any PDF viewer I've used so far, especially when it comes to quickly navigating between pages and chapters (crucial for non-linearly working with scientific papers etc).
        SSLy 2y ago
        I think everyone on Linux uses it just as the backend inside zathura https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zathura-pdf-mupdf/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zathura-pdf-mupd... (yes, it's associated with `application/epub+zip` ) and I can tell you that zathura feels very snappy. On Windows mupdf is used by SumatraPDF which also is stupidly fast and supports rendering EPUBs too. EDIT: there's also this https://sioyek.info/ https://sioyek.info/ found thanks to https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9d13dbb1ef2d0a6a6788d5b6fe4cbd727dd893c5/pkgs/applications/misc/sioyek/default.nix#L11 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9d13dbb1ef2d0a6a6788d5...
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        cess11 2y ago
        Ah. Well, that's how I use it on Debian because I'm terminally addicted, but I find the rendering satisfactory. IIRC it doesn't automatically reload from disk when the document changes, for that I use Evince. The Android version is a bit more than that however, it has a simple file browser, and I settled on it because it handles large files better than whatever alternatives I went through at the time.

The actual alternative is EPUBs

by SSLy 2y ago

The actual alternative is EPUBs

lxgr 2y ago

I love ePub, but I also have to admit that the viewer experience for non-books is really not quite there yet. Most viewers on iOS, macOS, Linux and Android that I've tried are very tied to the idea of all ePubs being ebooks and insist on managing them in their own library, don't optimize latency to first page rendered (because they usually index and cache a bunch of stuff for a "newly opened book", assuming you'll be reading it over the course of days/weeks) etc. For example, on macOS, the default app associated with ePub is Apple Books, but to be able to use technical papers in ePub format, I really need something like Preview.app (and that doesn't support them). (In that way, the situation is very similar to JPEG XL: macOS supports them in quick view, but only Safari can actually open them...)

cess11 2y ago
Did you try muPDF?
- lxgr 2y ago
  Is that available for macOS? I can't seem to find a recent release.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mupdf#default https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mupdf#default
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Thank you! Not sure how it is supposed to look like on other OSes, but this is barely a GUI application on macOS. (I have to launch it from the command line, UI and text rendering are extremely pixelated etc.) It's definitely not up to par with any PDF viewer I've used so far, especially when it comes to quickly navigating between pages and chapters (crucial for non-linearly working with scientific papers etc).
      - SSLy 2y ago
        I think everyone on Linux uses it just as the backend inside zathura https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zathura-pdf-mupdf/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zathura-pdf-mupd... (yes, it's associated with `application/epub+zip` ) and I can tell you that zathura feels very snappy. On Windows mupdf is used by SumatraPDF which also is stupidly fast and supports rendering EPUBs too. EDIT: there's also this https://sioyek.info/ https://sioyek.info/ found thanks to https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9d13dbb1ef2d0a6a6788d5b6fe4cbd727dd893c5/pkgs/applications/misc/sioyek/default.nix#L11 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9d13dbb1ef2d0a6a6788d5...
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - cess11 2y ago
        Ah. Well, that's how I use it on Debian because I'm terminally addicted, but I find the rendering satisfactory. IIRC it doesn't automatically reload from disk when the document changes, for that I use Evince. The Android version is a bit more than that however, it has a simple file browser, and I settled on it because it handles large files better than whatever alternatives I went through at the time.