Re: [math-fun] about pdf readers
If you want to see some of the cr*p that these bloated packages load (at least on Windows), do a Google search for "Windows" "autoruns", download it and run it. This little program will allow you to see & disable a huge number of background processes that are loaded by default. Apple is one of the worst, but Adobe is right behind them, in starting up all kinds of background processes that chew up memory and processor. You should easily be able to cut the number of these background processes in half, and also reduce your boot time significantly. You really don't need a separate process for every single software package whose entire job it is to look for an update for that package. The most obvious thing to do is to look for an update when the program runs; if you never run the program, you obviously don't need the update. (You'd think by now that Windows would have a single process that looked for updates for all packages, but that would be too easy.) I just got an HP machine & spent an entire day cleaning out all of the HP-related junk that didn't do any better job than the standard Microsoft software that it was trying to displace. At 03:46 PM 2/5/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-)
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.
[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in <=60 secs).
Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript").
And there is xpdf: executable < 300kB (but loads a couple
of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:
Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports
[...]
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,
nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com
Bob, Thanks! Marlin -----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Henry Baker Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2012 7:37 PM To: Robert Munafo Cc: math-fun Subject: Re: [math-fun] about pdf readers If you want to see some of the cr*p that these bloated packages load (at least on Windows), do a Google search for "Windows" "autoruns", download it and run it. This little program will allow you to see & disable a huge number of background processes that are loaded by default. Apple is one of the worst, but Adobe is right behind them, in starting up all kinds of background processes that chew up memory and processor. You should easily be able to cut the number of these background processes in half, and also reduce your boot time significantly. You really don't need a separate process for every single software package whose entire job it is to look for an update for that package. The most obvious thing to do is to look for an update when the program runs; if you never run the program, you obviously don't need the update. (You'd think by now that Windows would have a single process that looked for updates for all packages, but that would be too easy.) I just got an HP machine & spent an entire day cleaning out all of the HP-related junk that didn't do any better job than the standard Microsoft software that it was trying to displace. At 03:46 PM 2/5/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-)
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.
[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in <=60 secs).
Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript").
And there is xpdf: executable < 300kB (but loads a couple
of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:
Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports
[...]
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,
nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com
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Hello, (this is off math topics). Everybody agrees that Adobe acrobat reader is a bloat program, there is this reader : http://www.nitropdf.com/ called nitro pdf, I tried once, it is quite fast. Also, there is sometimes a bug in acrobat reader, on some documents it is impossible to search for any text even if the source text is readable, this is quite annoying and I really do not know why it is like that. you can select text but it can't search any string. Another bug is that even if the text is searchable, it takes forever to scan 200 pages of text, again I don't know why. Simon Plouffe Le 06/02/2012 14:51, Thomas, Marlin a écrit :
Bob, Thanks! Marlin
-----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Henry Baker Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2012 7:37 PM To: Robert Munafo Cc: math-fun Subject: Re: [math-fun] about pdf readers
If you want to see some of the cr*p that these bloated packages load (at least on Windows), do a Google search for "Windows" "autoruns", download it and run it. This little program will allow you to see& disable a huge number of background processes that are loaded by default. Apple is one of the worst, but Adobe is right behind them, in starting up all kinds of background processes that chew up memory and processor.
You should easily be able to cut the number of these background processes in half, and also reduce your boot time significantly.
You really don't need a separate process for every single software package whose entire job it is to look for an update for that package. The most obvious thing to do is to look for an update when the program runs; if you never run the program, you obviously don't need the update. (You'd think by now that Windows would have a single process that looked for updates for all packages, but that would be too easy.)
I just got an HP machine& spent an entire day cleaning out all of the HP-related junk that didn't do any better job than the standard Microsoft software that it was trying to displace.
At 03:46 PM 2/5/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-)
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt<arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.
[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in<=60 secs). Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript").
And there is xpdf: executable< 300kB (but loads a couple
of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system: Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports
[...]
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,
nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com
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There's a pdf reader built into the Chrome web browser because Adobe reader has so many security bugs that we don't allow people to install it at Google. On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 6:09 AM, Simon Plouffe <simon.plouffe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
(this is off math topics).
Everybody agrees that Adobe acrobat reader is a bloat program, there is this reader : http://www.nitropdf.com/ called nitro pdf, I tried once, it is quite fast.
Also, there is sometimes a bug in acrobat reader, on some documents it is impossible to search for any text even if the source text is readable, this is quite annoying and I really do not know why it is like that. you can select text but it can't search any string.
Another bug is that even if the text is searchable, it takes forever to scan 200 pages of text, again I don't know why. Simon Plouffe
Le 06/02/2012 14:51, Thomas, Marlin a écrit :
Bob, Thanks! Marlin
-----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Henry Baker Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2012 7:37 PM To: Robert Munafo Cc: math-fun Subject: Re: [math-fun] about pdf readers
If you want to see some of the cr*p that these bloated packages load (at least on Windows), do a Google search for "Windows" "autoruns", download it and run it. This little program will allow you to see& disable a huge number of background
processes that are loaded by default. Apple is one of the worst, but Adobe is right behind them, in starting up all kinds of background processes that chew up memory and processor.
You should easily be able to cut the number of these background processes in half, and also reduce your boot time significantly.
You really don't need a separate process for every single software package whose entire job it is to look for an update for that package. The most obvious thing to do is to look for an update when the program runs; if you never run the program, you obviously don't need the update. (You'd think by now that Windows would have a single process that looked for updates for all packages, but that would be too easy.)
I just got an HP machine& spent an entire day cleaning out all of the HP-related
junk that didn't do any better job than the standard Microsoft software that it was trying to displace.
At 03:46 PM 2/5/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-)
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt<arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size
of Adobe Reader.
[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in<=60 secs).
Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript").
And there is xpdf: executable< 300kB (but loads a couple
of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:
Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports
[...]
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,
nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.
--
Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com
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_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
* Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> [Feb 06. 2012 16:44]:
There's a pdf reader built into the Chrome web browser because Adobe reader has so many security bugs that we don't allow people to install it at Google.
[...]
That is quite lovely to hear... 8-) Not all "bugs" are bugs: I once wondered why acroread would hang at startup. As it happened there was a stale NFS mount and the thing stalled on scanning the disk starting from / (yes, the root dir). I got an idea what the outbound traffic by acroread might have contained... Here is a document to see how bad things can be: http://www.archive.org/details/combinatoryanaly02macmuoft choose the pdf (17MB). Flipping a page costs 10 secs with xpdf (which is not slow), and still 3 secs with mupdf (which is the Linux equivalent of sumatra-pdf as I found whith checking the sources). This is with a 3 GHz 64-bit CPU, so we are at >=10^10 cycles for rendering one bloody page of a text document. Insane! ...then get the djvu of the same document and rejoice, the performance is almost comparable with what one gets with a dvi file (and the xdvi viewer), which is > keyboard repetition rate which I have at 30 pages per sec. Pretty sure it would do 100/sec. dvi is also the _one_ format where I can point and click in the rendered document to start an editor which opens the corresponding TeX file and jump to the correct line in that file. Point and click in the TeX file lets the dvi viewer jump to the right place in the dvi and draw a neat frame around it (as a hint for the exact place). If you have ever worked with these then everything else, including the whole WYSIWYG nonsense, feels as welcome as a blunt head trauma.
Lately I've been using Chrome and its built in pdf reader works quite well, and has some advantages for me over Adobe's, for example it opens files quicker and seems to save a copy more easily to where I want. However, from time to time it tells me it cannot display a pdf file properly, and asks if I want to open with Adobe's instead. It never tells me what it had trouble with, though. On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
There's a pdf reader built into the Chrome web browser because Adobe reader has so many security bugs that we don't allow people to install it at Google.
participants (6)
-
Henry Baker -
James Buddenhagen -
Joerg Arndt -
Mike Stay -
Simon Plouffe -
Thomas, Marlin