Re: Improving DocView quality for PDFs?

[Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalintona@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 13 2024, Neal Becker wrote:

> 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?
>

Well, the pdf-tools repository[1] details the installation procedure
well: you should call `M-x pdf-tools-install'. After that, you can open
up a PDF and its major mode should be `pdf-view-mode'.

If it isn't already in that mode but works if you directly invoke `M-x
pdf-view-mode', then it'll probably be a problem with your config.

Footnotes:
[1]  https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-pdf-tools-elisp-code

-- 
Best,
Kristoffer