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Old 07-27-2009, 10:10 PM   #1
heron61
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Reading Large PDFs on the SmartQ 7

Many of my PDFs are role-playing games, which tend to be color PDFs that range in size from 5 to 50 MB. I have great difficulty using any of these on Evince in my Nokia n810, because they take several minutes to load and quite a while to turn pages. How well does the SmartQ 7 work for large PDFs? Is the initial load time slow (10-60 seconds), or really slow (1+ minutes), or does it load relatively rapidly?
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Old 07-28-2009, 06:50 AM   #2
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I'm not 100% sure how fast they load, I did try a PDF of a magazine similar to that size, and it did take a rather long time to load, probably over 1 minute.

Do you have the PDF to hand? I'd be happy to try it on my device and give you the results. I have read that evince isn't the ideal software to be using, so I may try to install a different PDF viewer soon.
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Old 08-10-2009, 11:39 AM   #3
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I have the smartq7 for 4 days now. To be honest the stock OS s*cks *rrrrs
I virtually can't read any pdf larger than 10MB, which means I cant use about 85% of my library. The unit runs sluggish (even after tweaking it a bit). Video playback is also crappy.
If I look @ the hardware, it's a jewel......

Anyway if by someone knows how to get pdf's working properly, please by all means, share the information.
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Old 08-10-2009, 12:03 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Erhenius View Post
I have the smartq7 for 4 days now. To be honest the stock OS s*cks *rrrrs
I virtually can't read any pdf larger than 10MB, which means I cant use about 85% of my library. The unit runs sluggish (even after tweaking it a bit). Video playback is also crappy.
If I look @ the hardware, it's a jewel......

Anyway if by someone knows how to get pdf's working properly, please by all means, share the information.
I am not recommending them just asking, have you tried xpdf-reader or epdfview from the repos ?
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Old 08-10-2009, 08:12 PM   #5
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couldnt install the xpdf reader (some dependancy issue i couldnt resolve, because the bloody /pool/ repository wont load)
epdf is a lot better, it would be perfect if full screen mode wouldn't suck so much. In fullscreen mode you have no power. you can only turn pages, no zoom (it just automatically zooms to "fit page" which makes this function quite useless.
So you have to juggle a lot in window mode....come to think of it, it isnt actually that bad. It works, and that for 150 bucks
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Old 08-10-2009, 08:40 PM   #6
heron61
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Originally Posted by Erhenius View Post
couldnt install the xpdf reader (some dependancy issue i couldnt resolve, because the bloody /pool/ repository wont load)
epdf is a lot better, it would be perfect if full screen mode wouldn't suck so much. In fullscreen mode you have no power. you can only turn pages, no zoom (it just automatically zooms to "fit page" which makes this function quite useless.
So you have to juggle a lot in window mode....come to think of it, it isnt actually that bad. It works, and that for 150 bucks
Does ePDF work with large files? How long does it take to turn a page on a 20+ MB graphic heavy PDF?
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Old 08-11-2009, 02:18 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by heron61 View Post
Does ePDF work with large files? How long does it take to turn a page on a 20+ MB graphic heavy PDF?
It's doing quite well with my math book of 25+mb with 1200+ pages.

Epdf just renders 1 page, i think that is what makes it not crash.
Each page takes about 3-7 seconds to load depending on the size of each individual page.

edit: if you want extra screen real estate you can remove the status- and toolbar, after adjusting the zoom and jump to selected page. or "click-drag" out of view
you can adjust zoom with 0,1 % increments, you need to widen the epdf window to make it appear in the tool bar

edit2: ok I have tested it for a while now and it seems to work perfectly so far on 30+ mb files. Also I don't see any difference in load time in different sizes of documents, the load time is rather determined by the page characteristics (if it is a scan, page dimensions etc..).
I strongly recommend to use the screen rotation script (http://www.jiongtang.com/blog/html/tag/smartq-mid) It is meant for the Q5 but works on the Q7. This will give you some extra width when holding it like a slate.

so what I do is:
1 open the .pdf
2 judge if it is better to read in landscape or slate and rotate screen accordingly (most of the time this will crash epdf viewer, just open it again)
3 jump to the page i want
4 adjust zoom
5 align the window
5 ???
6 Profit !

result:

Last edited by Erhenius; 08-11-2009 at 01:39 PM.
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Old 08-13-2009, 02:11 AM   #8
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A Different Method

I have been tinkering with this problem and have a solution which seems quite effective.

What I have done is to break the PDF into separate JPGs then compress them back into a CBZ comic file. The resulting file can be viewed with Evince or Comix and flips pages almost immediately.

To do this on my linux pc I used the command "convert NAME.pdf NAME.jpg".
Then I selected all the resulting JPGs and compressed them into a CBZ file.

The result is not as sharp as the original PDF but is slightly smaller and works much faster. There are some functions of the "convert" app that may be useful but I haven't had much time to experiment.

I'm sure that there are comparable tools for Mac and Windows if you look. Remember that CBZ files are just ZIP files with the extension renamed.

I'd be interested to know if anyone can finesse this method a bit.

@ Heron - This would almost certainly work for your N810 as well.

Last edited by JamesFlames; 08-13-2009 at 02:14 AM. Reason: Addition
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Old 08-14-2009, 05:24 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by JamesFlames View Post
I have been tinkering with this problem and have a solution which seems quite effective.
If I use convert on large PDF files, it consumes so much memory that the process is killed before it manages to convert a single page. I read up a bit on alternative methods, and this is what I came up with.

First, we use pdftoppm to convert all the pages in the PDF, or a subsection of them. To convert all pages

Code:
pdftoppm my_pdf_file.pdf prefix_name
where my_pdf_file.pdf is the file to convert, and prefix_name the base name used for the converted images. To convert a subsection

Code:
pdftoppm my_pdf_file.pdf -f first_page -l last_page prefix_name
You can also get grayscale images etc. using additional pdftoppm options. The conversion is pretty fast and produces good looking images.

Now you have to convert the ppm images to jpeg. One thing you can also do is crop the resulting jpeg images, so as to eliminate white borders around the text. Conversion is done using convert, but again processing each single file works much better on my pc than doing everything in one go

Code:
for f in $(ls *ppm); do convert $f -quality 0.85 $f.jpg; done
If you need to crop edges, first look at the original dimensions

Code:
identify prefix_name_001.jpg
or open one of the files in an image editor. Let's say our image file is 1220x1610 and we want to crop 30 pixels from each side, our conversion options become

Code:
for f in $(ls *ppm); do convert $f -crop 1160x1550+30+30\! -quality 0.85 $f.jpg; done
We are basically saying to crop the original image so that we get a 1160x1550 one, with horizontal and vertical offsets of 30 pixels, and to resize the canvas dimensions of the converted image to the cropped size.

Then it's just a matter of zipping all the jpg files.
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Old 10-01-2009, 01:35 PM   #10
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Anyone tried xournal with large pdf's? When I receive my Smartq 7 I like to scribble/annotate some of my pdf's. Most PDF's contain scans and can be as big as 150 Mb. I would rather not convert them, so I hope there is a way to open huge files like this.
On my Ubuntu desktop Evince seems to be very slow in opening them and wants to render all pages. Xournal tries the same, but I am still able to read the pdf while it is trying.
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Old 10-05-2009, 11:40 AM   #11
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I am running Ver.5.0 and tried opening a 68MB (1003 page) PDF in Evince and Okular from SD card.
In Evince it took about 30 seconds and Okular took about 45 seconds.

I like Okular because it let me highlight, make notes, etc., on the PDF, but it is a little heavy and takes slightly more time to load.. but once loaded it is pretty smooth...

Last edited by m26k9; 10-05-2009 at 11:44 AM.
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Old 11-17-2009, 05:10 AM   #12
showgan
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How to install Okular?

Hi m26k9,
How did you install Okular? I just bought SmartQ7 and I want a PDF reader that allows annotations and bookmarks.
Thanks!
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Old 11-17-2009, 06:04 AM   #13
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Hi m26k9,
How did you install Okular? I just bought SmartQ7 and I want a PDF reader that allows annotations and bookmarks.
Thanks!
just do 'sudo apt-get install okular' from evilvte.
As far as I can remember thats all I did.

But make sure you are running ver. 5.0. I couldn't get it to install on ver. 4.0. Ver. 5.0 uses a repo ported from Ubuntu.
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Old 11-18-2009, 06:00 AM   #14
showgan
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Thanks! It didn't work for me at first but it worked after I did:
apt-get update

It gave some errors at the end of the installation but Okular seems to be working fine.

Thanks again!
Haroon
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Old 11-18-2009, 07:32 AM   #15
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Originally Posted by showgan View Post
Thanks! It didn't work for me at first but it worked after I did:
apt-get update

It gave some errors at the end of the installation but Okular seems to be working fine.

Thanks again!
Haroon
Glad to see it working.
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