I've posted about this before and I can't believe I'm the only person seeing this : xpdf is slow to render PDFs and navigating through a document is ponderous. The problem is there on my laptop ( Core i3 ) and my desktop ( Core i7 ). I played with the ./configure options in the Slackbuild and deleting the -mtune=i686 option made it much more responsive. I'm not smart enough to debug the problem myself so any help would be appreciated. It's so bad I've got Debian on a separate partition and I boot into that if I need to look at PDFs.

same here. i have researched around and didn't find anything that fixed it for me (i remember someone talking about the font configuraion, somewhere on this forum). i just gave up and am using epdfviewer, evince and okular... i would be very interested in the solution tho!

Interesting... I'm on 13.37 and even with 13.1 of Slackware xpdf has been fine for me...

Hi

I did a linux questions search, see:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...slowly-840078/

I never noticed it being slow
but creating a ~/.xpdfrc a few releases ago based upon what
allend said really sped things up for me

John

Ahh, that would shed some light on this... I have Windows fonts installed in my .fonts so perhaps xpdf has less of an issue rendering documents for me. Interesting to hear if the OP has Windows fonts or not...

I haven't installed any windows fonts and xpdf is slow to use. I am on 13.37. I prefer to use another pdf viewer anyway, so I just installed another one and use it. Good luck!

13.37 on an i3 here, and the same thing; loads up fine but scrolling sucks real bad. I initially ignored it and started using okular instead, but I am going to try the modified xpdf.rc from linked thread.

I read something in the past about GCC changes with regard to floating-point calculations causing some trouble. If I remember right, the code checks some floating-point numbers for equality (no tolerance), and the GCC changes break xpdf's caching because the comparison doesn't work as it used to.

Google turns up this:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=577031

Just tested it on my end with no issues at all, tried quite a few .pdf's. Slackware64 13.37 Multilib i3 core laptop

Same problem here (since 13.1). I just switched to evince...

I've tried modifying the font path to /usr/share/libwmf in .xpfrc and it made no noticeable difference. That Debian bug link posted by elyk looks like it might be the problem.

i've had this problem on slack13.1, back then it was the float-issue. i recompiled it using a patch and everything worked -- unfortunately, this was quite some time ago and meanwhile I have switched to a 64-bit machine, so I don't know where i got it from any more .
but a quick google found this one:
http://recipes.gobolinux.org/r/?list...03-float.patch
maybe you could give it a try.

Thanks to san above , applying that patch does indeed speed it up

I prepared simple chart using LibreOffice Draw module and exported it to PDF file. When I open it with Xpdf and I try to scroll the chart horizontally, vertically or diagonally using my ThinkPad’s TrackPoint top reports Xpdf uses 97–100% of CPU and the chart rewinds very slowly.

That’s the mentioned chart:

family_tree.pdf

I tried Xpdf in the standard configuration as well as in the configuration suggested by allend in the related thread. In both cases Xpdf behaves the same. I still use Slackware 13.1.

You could observe the same result scrolling the chart with arrow keys instead of mouse wheel or ThinkPad’s TrackPoint. Just press the arrow key for a while and then switch to the terminal running top.