Re: Improving DocView quality for PDFs?

[Neal Becker <ndbecker2@gmail.com>]

Kristoffer Balintona wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 07 2024, Christopher Howard wrote:
> 
>> Hi, I like viewing PDFs inside Emacs using DocView, but the quality is
>> noticeable lower than in Evince. It looks blocky, like it needs aliasing
>> or something. Could I improve this with some setting changes? I see some
>> variables like Doc View Ghostscript Options but I don't know what options
>> I need to pass in. I see some discussions about this on the Internet but
>> they are very old discussions with unclear guidance.
>>
>> I am running GNU Emacs 30.0.91 (build 10, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+
>> Version 3.24.41, cairo version 1.18.0) of 2024-10-04.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Have you given pdf-tools
> (https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#about-pdf-tools)
> a go yet? If you haven't heard of it, I think this is the go-to Emacs
> PDF viewer for many users because it is very fast and supports many
> features that non-Emacs PDF viewers support, like making and viewing
> annotations as well as jumping to different points in a document's
> outline (though that requires certain metadata to be present in the
> document).
> 
> If you want to stick with the built-in DocView, I don't have any tips
> there since I use pdf-tools's pdf-view-mode in place of it.
> 

Interesting.  I'm also trying pdf-tools.  But how do I know if emacs is 
using it?