ETA: Okular + MuPDF backend seems the best answer for Linux.
Original Gripe:
Why is there no such thing as a pdf viewer capable of flipping through a game book (e.g. the OSE bundle on DTRPG) as fast as a physical book?
I mean, startup time is one thing; rendering a book with all of the art and fonts and backgrounds, sure, take a minute to do so, especially with the really dense books with tons of complex layout.
But why does every pdf viewer seem to throw out the rendered pages and only keep a handful open at a time? I have 64GB of RAM, I can fit the entire book in memory; heck, it could rasterize the entire thing to .bmp and store a thousand copies of it, easily, so why do they all prefer low memory usage to speed?
ETA: In the tradition of complaining about something followed by finally getting a lucky search result, I immediately found MuPDF, which is very fast engine but not really usable as an app itself, but is used as a backend by several other apps. One of those apps, Okular, also has memory configuration options, one of which is "greedy" which will use up to half your RAM to keep rendered pages in.
So #Okular + #MuPDF appears to solve my problem, finally, after years of griping about it.
Ditch evince!
#pdf #pdfviewer