[poppler] optimized pdf rendering

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dimecres, 26 de gener de 2011, Erik Rehn va escriure:
> Hey Popplers!
> 
> This is my first message to this list, hope there is some activity. :)
> 
> Anyway, im doing some research into the field of pdf rendering and came
> across poppler/xpdf which seems to be quite easy to work with. Now I
> have some questions for you guys :)
> 
> How fast is Poppler compared to other pdf libraries, commercial and open
> source? What im looking for is the fastest way possible to render pdfs
> into bitmaps. Ive done some testing with the pdftoppm tool and it  seem
> to be slightly slower than for instance Foxit's SDK.

We are Free Software though. That's something they can not compete with.

> 
> Is there any optimization that could be done to speed up the rendering?

There is always room for optimization.

> My goal is to develop a server side pdf rendering engine which clients
> can request individual pages from. If for instance the same page is
> requested twice but in different sizes is there any part of the
> rendering process that could be cached to save work?
> One thing would be to cache PDFDoc objects to avoid parsing the same pdf
> over and over, does anyone have any thoughts on that?

At the moment caching the PDFDoc won't give you much of a speed imrpovement. 
But yes you could implement something so that you don't need to parse the pdf 
every time we render something. If you have lots of free time feel free to 
start with that, though mostly i think the problem is not parsing the file 
(except in very simple files) but the actual rasterization.

Albert

> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> Best regards,
> Erik Rehn
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