My workflow for the last ~10 years:
The vimtex plugin provides a lot of nice features, but you can also just run
latexmk -pvc -pdf file.tex
in one terminal, and edit the file in vim (etc.) in another, and it'll automatically recompile on save (-pvc
= preview continuously).
man mupdf doesn't list "a" as a bound key on Arch.
According to https://mupdf.com/docs/manual-mupdf-gl.html you want mupdf-gl instead. The man page isn't updated but the "a" key does launch the annotation editor.
I've heard that EPUB format is better for mobile devices. So maybe you should look into that as well.
As for PDF, you probably can find some suitable viewer/reader in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
Particularly, MuPDF looks like a decent choice for a phone. It even supports EPUB files too, though I have no idea how well it handles them.
On another note, the story in Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? can get pretty emotional at times. So I think that it might be better to read it when you don't have to worry about your surroundings and can get fully immersed.
Seems like an unusual epub. It's really hard to know how to handle it without seeing it.
Calibre's GUI does offer a front-end to ebook-convert, though it's been ages since I've tried it.
I understand finding calibre bloated. I think it's bloated too, and also creates folders I don't want it create in my home folder, which drives me crazy. You can run ebook-viewer
directly without launching the regular GUI, but it still won't be as lightweight as you might want. But if this is just one epub one time, it's probably more robust than others.
For a lightweight epub viewer, I'd probably go with mupdf or zathura. (Till recently I'd have said llpp which is based on the same codebase, but I think the developer has removed the sources for reasons having to do with the war in Ukraine.) However, I think these are based on the same library as Sumatra for Windows, so you may have the same problem.
There are epub plugins for most browsers, which is natural since epub uses xhtml. Might be my next attempt in your shoes.
> How long should it take for a file that size to open?
Testing some uncached PDF files of 300MB to 600MB on Linux using Zathura, yields times of six to seven seconds to the first viewable page.
Even after flushing caches, the cross-platform MuPDF turned out to be much faster: two to three seconds. If you're experiencing load times of more than five seconds with MuPDF on a Windows machine with gigabytes of free memory, then I'd remove "anti-virus" software and test again.
Have you tried opi mupdf? (Sorry, I'm on a Fedora box myself at the moment so I can't test it myself). Maybe a good soul was able to build it already.
Otherwise, I would look for an AppImage or Flatpak. If you can't find either then there's always compiling from source: https://mupdf.com/docs/building.html (and if you do compile from source and it's nontrivial to do it, please do upload a package to OBS) :).
as /u/facesofvader said, each page is an image, so the best you can do is cut or snip the images from each page in the best resolution you can get. There are a couple of options that come to mind
Open the document to the best zoom you can such that each snake image fills up a sizable portion of the screen. Use a screen capture utility. There are a number of good ones at https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?sc=184, all freeware and portable for the windows platform.
2nd method. Command line, but very fast. muTool can extract all images (pages) in one go with the command line
mutool extract yourfile.pdf
You will get one image per file created. Open each in a graphic view/editor, and cut out each image that you want. I prefer Irfanview, but there are other high quality ones out there as well.
If you can program in Java then Apache PDFBox is an excellent very high quality library for reading (and writing) PDFs.
Another possibility is MuPDF. There are bindings for many platforms and languages.
It's a rather McGuyverish solution, but a few years ago, when there was neither pdf support in WebEngine nor QtPdf, we used mupdf (we needed Windows only) called via QProcess on the commandline to get all this information (and display pdf rendered as images in a tmp directory using a custom image provider). Using the commandline tools, you should be able to output stuff like page count etc rather easily. It's a hack, but it worked very reliably.
If you want pure suckless you should probably go with something mupdf since it has less dependencies and therefor less bloat. Sadly it lacks the coloring/customizing options tho
It really depends on the way the PDFs were created. Some PDFs are text with formatting, while others are literally just images of the pages in a PDF container. There are several alternative PDF readers though. You'll have to try with the files you want to read, as there is no best app.
KOReader takes a bit to get used to the interface but is pretty powerful. You can also auto or pre-set zoom/crop to get rid of unneeded whitespace.
MuPDF is an app and rendering library that reads a lot of formats and has plugins. It's the backend of a bunch of other PDF apps, including KOReader, so if it does what you need you might see if their app works for you. Or, find another app using it for rendering with an interface you like. If it doesn't render then you'll need to find an app based on another backend.
I use mupdf, which is PDF, XPS, and E-book viewer from https://mupdf.com/.
It is pretty minimalistic, but works very well for viewing/presenting the supported documents. It doesn't have any menu and completely controlled by hotkeys, but extremely fast and simple.
After opening the pdf document, which is usually renders in small window on my Pixelbook, I am switch to fullscreen and using Shift+W or Shift+H to make it fit screen to width / to height. Works pretty fine and rendering is much better than on Qpdfview, which is blurry in full screen.
If by "PC" you mean Windows, then SumatraPDF and MuPDF are free readers. Foxit PhantomPDF has a free trial; other software like LibreOffice can export PDFs but I'm not terribly familiar with applications that can edit existing PDFs.
I would recommend against SumatraPDF. It's based on MuPDF except the maintainer hasn't pulled patches from upstream in ages. There are some bad vulnerabilities in the MuPDF version used by SumatraPDF that will remain unresolved until the maintainer pulls the latest MuPDF from upstream.
I found out about another FOSS PDF project while I was talking to some people in IRC .. worth keeping an eye on, I think. I was chatting with the main developer and it seems like an interesting project.. he's writing a fast and super lightweight PDF library in C, and then creates viewers for various platforms. I think he said the core library is only around 10MB.
Not sure how well known this one is.. it was the first time I had ever heard of it