Moderators:PDF-XChange Support, Daniel - PDF-XChange, Chris - PDF-XChange, Sean - PDF-XChange, Paul - PDF-XChange, Vasyl - PDF-XChange, Ivan - Tracker Software, Stefan - PDF-XChange
I am using LaTeX to create slides for my teaching in the form of PDF documents.
A sad difference between PDF-XChange Viewer and Acrobat Reader in showing these slides is, that PDF-XChange Viewer blanks the screen between each subsequent page in full-screen mode while Acrobat just updates the screen.
Is there a setting which I haven't found yet to prevent PDF XChange Viewer (2.0 42.4 as updated yesterday evening) from blanking the screen between pages?
I'll attach an example PDF from the LaTeX Acrotex package. On Acrobat Reader it displays a pointer going around a circle, in PDF-XChange Viewer it displays a sequence of individual pages with long blank intervals in between.
You can attach PDF files if you archive them first.
The flickering can be removed by increasing the memory allowed for page rendering. Preferences, Peformance, and change Automatic to 50% — that works on my system.
Windows 10 Home 64-bit • AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, 8 Gb
Review: http://www.softerviews.org/PDF-XChange.html
...it only helps for the second time each slide is displayed - probably because PDF-XChange Viewer stores the rendered image in a cache? Still, in a typical lecture with about 200 subslides this would mean that I had to go through all of them once before starting the lecture. I also doubt that even 75% (maximum setting) of my computers RAM would be sufficient to keep all the pre-rendered images.
It appears that Acrobat Reader will have to stay on my system for some time to come...
It really would help, if the screen would not be blanked between slides! It is not a matter of the rendering speed, I would not think that Acrobat is faster, but Acrobat does not appear to remove the previous slide before starting rendering the new slide.
thanks for posting these details. What I have heard from the dev team is that this flicker is because our rendering engine is asynchronous while Adobe's is synchronous. This is by design and is partly the reason PDF-XChange Viewer renders as quickly as it does.
Having said that - the team has it on their radar and a future build could include some improvement like slide-show, animation and/or transition effects, but for now this is not going to change.
Best regards
Paul O'Rorke
PDF-XChange Support
http://www.pdf-xchange.com
In this particular case actually the rendering engine of Acrobat Reader actually also appears to be faster than PDF-XChange Viewer. I am looking forward to further improvements in PDF-XChange! In tackling this particular problem (and PDF-based slide presentations are gaining momentum) there is little need for additional transistion - if only the screen wouldn't be blanked between pages...
In this particular case actually the rendering engine of Acrobat Reader actually also appears to be faster than PDF-XChange Viewer
It depends on the PDF file - with simple PDF pages Adobe looks faster (our engine is asynchronous and it has therefore a 'footprint' as you can imagine), but if you compare Adobe and PDF-XChange on complex drawings you will notice a very different outcome, for example see these files:
I also use LaTeX (Beamer) to produce slides for presentations using PDF-XChange Viewer. There is indeed a problem with very slow rendering of slides that have large images embedded in them. I also am obliged to use Acrobat for slide presentation because the rendering of the large image files is too slow. I do not really see this as "flickering" on the screen, but simply that the next slide does not come on.
I agree with uwezi that performance can be improved by passing through all of the slides once so that they are cached, however, this is not at all practical with a large presentation. Again, for me the problem is one of rendering speed, the rendering of large bitmap.
It would be great if this problem could be addressed as I would love to move away from Acrobat entirely.
I just installed PDF-XChange Viewer today as Acrobat Reader did not allow me to do things such as highlighting.
I used PDF-XChange to highlight identical comments and mistakes in the print out of two programs that belonged to students who had colluded in their coursework.
Then I tested PDF-XChange with my lecture slides (produced using Beamer) and was a bit disappointed as using animation involving multyple slides does not work well because of slide "jumpy" transitions.
Your product seems superior to acrobat reader (It is a very new product to me). I hope you can fix that in the future.
Yes there is a Synchronous mode, but please use it with caution as larger and heavier files could "lock" quite some resources, which could have quite an impact on the whole system performance.
I've used the viewer in synchronous mode in a lecture and have not had any problem of
performance. I've recommended the product to our support team (I am a lecturer in a CS department in a UK university) who are going to evaluate it to see if they should install it on our lab machine in place of Acrobat reader (I told them about the license that says that permission to do so should be asked for.)
