As I wondered about how large the potential for pdf rendering speed improvement is, I loaded a complex PDF both with the Picsel Browser for Zaurus and the iLiad. The result is interesting, because the Picsel Browser shows the first page much much quicker, but as it apparently continues preloading the whole file it runs out of memory soon.

In any way there is much potential in the iLiad, because the hardware of the two devices seems to be pretty similar.

Click onto the screenshot to start a slow download of a 5.86 MB Divx encoded AVI movie or use the below mirror link for a fast download:

http://194.231.52.98/zeugs/dr_iliad_versus_zaurus.jpg (http://194.231.52.98/zeugs/dr_iliad_versus_zaurus.avi)

Mirror, kindly provided by BKeeper (http://www.amniotic.net/mobileread/dr_iliad_versus_zaurus.avi)

More information about Picsel Browser for Zaurus (including another video;-) here (http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12436&hl=) .

ok, pagefile is a good idea. But:
Where would you save it?
Internal Flash = Bad Idea, limited write cycles, after that the flash would be used up.
Ramdisk = um, we got only 64 MB.

The only thing where you could save the pagefile would be the external memory (CF,SD or USB). The best option would than be a Microdrive, although wouldn't that be a little power sucker?

I tried on iLiad to remove the CF card after loading first page of pdf file [novel, 2 MB]. It worked, even last page was loadable without CF. iLiad obviously loads this pdf file into main memory or RAM or what ever.

maybe the file itself. but what R2D2 would like to see is pregenerating the Bitmaps readily for putting them to the Display/e-ink. And that will probably need some more space then only some MB of the PDF/document itself.

Loading files into memory seems to be common in Linux/unix-derivatives. I have been told that there should have been cases where harddrives of a server died but it kept up and running cause it had all needed files cached in memory. I have not verified that.

ok, pagefile is a good idea. But:
Where would you save it?

On the Zaurus I am using a microdrive. Works great! Of course I did not use it in the test. Power consumption is ok.

I don't know if xpdf already does this, but caching the bitmap of individual glyphs (characters at specific font size + style) would seem a wise thing to do. Given that a page (or entire pdf) will most probably use the same font size for a lot of the text.

I'm sure a lot of the time on the iliad is converting the vector based font data to nice anti-aliased bitmap characters.

On pre-rendering pages before they are viewed, a 1024x768 at 16 colours (4 bit) is 384 KBytes so you could store a few in RAM while your reading the first.

You could also do some very basic/fast compression (such as RLE) that would shrink a bitmap showing a page of text a lot.