MuPdf / Fitz

[Tor Andersson]

Raph Levien <raph at casper.ghostscript.com> wrote:

>    I took MuPdf for a brief spin, and I am impressed! The text and
> image rendering is very pretty, and it _feels_ responsive.

That is the whole point of it :)

>    I did notice that the qt version chews up a ton of memory on the X
> server. Without looking at the code, I'd guess that it's allocating
> and not releasing pixmaps. Obviously, using GdkRgb (as the Ksvg people
> are doing) would fix this.

Don't blame me, a friend wrote the front-end :) The memory you are seeing
is probably the 20 Mb page cache. We have a Gtk+ front-end in progress,
that uses GdkRgb. It is much faster than the Qt one, and doesn't have the
annoying flickering.

>    There's a lot of stuff that you're not implementing. As I wrote
> in my diary, I _am_ interested in that stuff. I'm wondering to what
> extent you're interested in pooling resources and working on Fitz.
> Antony has posted some goals here:
>
>    http://www.haskell.org/fitz/arch/arch.html
>
>    My main issue with Fitz right now is that I'm quite busy with the
> 8.0 release. So, if your goal is to get stuff done quickly, I might
> be a slow-down. I guess the big question is how great the impedance
> mismatch is between your goals and mine.

I am interested in much of that stuff too, just not as much as other
things that I find more pressing, like good typography. It would be
a good idea to pool our efforts.

I would love to work on Fitz with you. I am not in a rush, so that is
not a problem. I have been working on and off on my typesetting system
for the past two years, getting sidetracked into writing my own toolkit
and other things. Hopefully, Fitz can provide the foundation I have been
looking for. Let's talk more.

I have a few comments on the goals on Antony's page, but that will have
to wait until after lunch. We should really set up a wiki.

Regards,
	Tor