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by washbear 1414 days ago
I wonder if there's a PDF reader that can render to sixel graphics - mlterm-wscons can display sixels.
1 comments

Seems like sixel would be an excellent solution, thanks very much for that pointer.

However, I can always convert PDFs to images and go forward from there, I guess. It's not a bad workaround. The fbi image viewer is available for NetBSD's X Window system; not sure about the framebuffer port. https://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/

EDIT: Apparently, NetBSD has lsix: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/graphics/ls...

"Like ls, but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics. /.../ Because lsix uses ImageMagick pretty much any image format will be supported. However, some may be slow to render (like PDF), so lsix doesn't show them unless you ask specifically."

On Linux, the green pdf reader for Linux apparently supports sixel: https://github.com/schandinat/green

Screenshot of green+sixel on NixOS: https://teddit.net/r/commandline/comments/4oldf5/view_pdfs_i...

Another Linux pdf reader with sixel: https://github.com/dsanson/termpdf

All in all, woah, lots of fascinating reading and links here -- since I was not much aware of sixel before: https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

The sixel format itself seems to match really well with the NetBSD philosophy (among other things, keeping old hardware running via low-demanding, essentials-only software). Thanks again for that pointer.