Good Pdf Viewers For Plots With Thousands Of Points?

Question

[Ryan Thompson]

This may be a little off topic, but I think it addresses a problem that a lot of us have. Very often, in reading papers or in our own work, we end up wanting to view plots that have thousands, or tens of thousands, of elements in them, such as an MA plot of all 20,000 or so genes in the human genome. Many PDF readers tend to choke on a page with 20,000 elements on it, and either crash or take an inordinately long time to display the page, sometimes hanging the entire system while they work. So does anyone have suggestions on what PDF viewers can handle the kinds of resource-intensive PDF files that bioinformaticians tend to run across so often?

[Charles Plessy]

When the points are plotted without transparency, I sometimes round the numbers and remove all the duplicate points, to produce a PDF (or SVG) file that renders visually the same but is dramatically smaller.

Answer 1

[Dan D]

I would just flatten the PDF to eliminate the image layers, condensing the images to something like a JPG format and thus drastically reducing the complexity.

I think another way to flatten a PDF is to print your PDF to a PDF printer (Adobe or a free alternative).

Yo dawg I heard u like PDFs so I printed ur PDF 2 a PDF.

Answer 2

[jackuser1979]

This is the list PDF viewer for opening larger files. Give it try yourself.
1. Sumatra PDF (Windows verison): http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/download-free-pdf-viewer.html
2 .Okular (Multiplatform): http://okular.kde.org/
3. MUPDF (windows, source code for all platforms) : http://www.mupdf.com/

Answer 3

[EagleEye]

Ubuntu default Evince Document viewer is super fast than any other viewer (in my experience). Okular is also good, but I prefer Evince Document viewer for larger files.