Hello Alex,
I assure you that there are significant benefits to our approach, which have been verified in ten years of production.
Our users look at a lot of drawings in one day (thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands). The size of the PDFs we are talking about here is DIN A2 (or larger). We always use single page PDFs.
The main thing we minimize is the amount of time a white/empty page is shown between documents, because the constant flickering annoys our users a lot.
Unfortunately, we cannot use a pure image viewer because some data we display is not purely graphic and our users also want to use PDF-Annotations. If a user wants to view data quickly he/she uses prescaled viewing mode. If working with text elements is required the user switches to original viewing mode. Our document archive provides all data in image and PDF format to provide (no adhoc computations required - except for the scaling of images to the appropriate resolution needed).
If there was a way to render/rasterize a PDF in the background and then very quickly change the PDF view to the new pixels/content without any visible flickering, that would be ideal. Is that possible using the SDK?
Fine Regards,
AnKeilha