qpdfview

Can I open compressed files?

Asked by Jesse Talavera-Greenberg

Is it possible to load documents that are compressed in some format (ideally GZ, but I don't really have a preference)? Evince, for instance, can open something.pdf.gz, but qpdfview can't. If not, is there a way I can work around this (Ubuntu 15.04)? Because I'd really like to see this added.

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Adam Reichold
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Best Adam Reichold (adamreichold) said : 		#1

Hello Jesse,

PDF and DjVu support internal content-type-specific compression mechanisms that are usually more effective than just compressing the whole file, so the only format where this is really useful is PostScript. But then again that format seems to be more and more limited to intermediate resp. temporary files where compression is not that useful as well. And since the libraries we use would more or less force us to pass a local path as the lowest common denominator for file access, we would probably end up extracting the compressed file into a temporary file which not very effective and can probably achieved just as well by using a small helper scripts the calls gzip/bzip2/xz/etc first and then qpdfview. Therefore I don't think this should be implemented in qpdfview.

Best regards, Adam.

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Lyn Perrine (walterorlin) said : 		#2

IF you are more comfortable with graphical tools I can in Lubuntu 15.10 open the archive in an archive manager and then right click open with qpdfview. I think this has worked for a while if you open the .gz with archive manager and then select a pdf viewer. I think this is more something. Yeah compressing .pdf doesn't seem to save much disk space at all. Honestly it is probably a better idea to extract them if say you got them compressed. I think this might be more of somethinking that ideally a desktop environmnet could do or that particular DE equivlenent lxqt-config-file-associations to set once and rember always. The compression on disk size savings for pdf files is actually much worse than I thought even for pdfs that are mostly and I know plain text compresses well.

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Jesse Talavera-Greenberg (jessetalavera) said : 		#3

Thanks Adam Reichold, that solved my question.