- Use thumbnails if they are available. That will make the preview
faster, if the images are big.
That sounds right in theory at least, but I would not be terribly suprised if Inkscape was just as fast if not faster in many cases. (librsvg was and possibly still is faster than libpng).
Testing with an SVG that contains patterns, gradients, embedded images, lots of transforms and clones might help prove it holds true for larger more complex documents.
How can SVG+Raster graphics be faster than pregeneratd raster graphics? Does inkscape have some brilliant system of dropping detail when zoomed far out?
Having tested it, I tend to disagree. My machine is not too fast, but the preview generation is surprisingly fast even for very complex files (fraction of a second even for the advanced tutorial). Opening the dialog itself takes longer. On the other hand on-the-fly previews have the advantage of being always up to date and leaving no garbage on the disk.
The "garbage on disk" is intentional because it allows applications that do not understand SVG (or whatever else) to reuse the thumbnails (I realise SVG is not the best example because Nautilus can already preview SVG as can any GDKPixbuf capable application).
- Alan H.