For what it's worth, KDE's Okular starts instantly and can preview a wide range of documents.
Re:Elementary OS 6 Odin
by mananaysiempre on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:58PM
(#28146157)
Evince is also pretty snappy. Not as omnivorous, but let’s be honest, most of my hard drive is PDFs.
Quickly flipping between files with horizontal arrows (or something of a similar complexity) is actually the more interesting function here, I think, and maybe it does warrant a mode. Some picture viewers try to make the switch implicit (flip between files when picture fits on screen, pan horizontally when not), but my builtin mode tracker gets out of sync frequently, and I would absolutely hate to have the same error-prone controls in a PDF viewer, where I sometimes stare at a single file for hours and sometimes flip through a dozen in a minute. No idea how this should be done.
I just think that it the apps that make it necessary shouldn’t do so: if Photoshop (or GIMP, or LibreOffice, or whatever) takes 30 seconds to open a file, the solution shouldn’t be to layer on yet another option and make me think whether I want to suffer that delay or reduced functionality, it should be to eliminate the delay.
Yet (as I’ve also said) I don’t think anybody came up with a plausible way to do so (even a purely technical one, disregarding economic incentives for app developers).