[poppler] Cairo output slower than splash output?

[Kristian Høgsberg]

GhePeU wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Since the last weeks I've been using evince 0.3.2 and poppler 0.3.3 to
> view PDF files. As my distro (Gentoo) provides an old release of cairo
> (0.4.0) due to compatibility issues with other programs, I was using the
> splash output, and today I decided to recompile poppler with the last
> cairo snapshot (0.5.1) and the corresponding libpixman 0.1.5 and glitz
> 0.4.3. 
> After a few seconds I noticed that cairo output is visibly slower than
> splash output, with both text-only PDF and PDF with mixed images and
> text. This is particularly manifest when I change page: with splash
> output a new page is immediately rendered, but with cairo there is a
> noticeable delay during which I see a blank page. Also, when I zoom in
> cairo needs more time to render precisely the fonts.
> Are this issues due to problems in my system or are they common problems
> that will disappear with future optimizations?

Currently, cairo is pretty bad at handling images.  Also, vector 
graphics is currently slower with cairo, partly because cairo renders 
anti-aliased graphics, partly because cairo hasn't been optimized much 
yet.  For text-only documents, though, cairo should be able to keep up 
with splash.  If you have a specific document that you think 
poppler+cairo should be able to render faster, please open a bug in 
bugzilla and attach the document there, then I'll take a look.

thanks,
Kristian