I've no way to currently check if my assumption is correct -- but here it goes anyway:
I suspect that evince
cannot directly render and display PostScript on screen. Maybe it can only do so for PDF. So it may use a trick for PostScript files: behind you back it converts them to a temporary PDF file and display that one instead.
Try to install the (very old-fashioned) gv
PostScript viewer on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install gv
and then
gv /path/to/PostScript.ps
and see if it is any faster. (gv
also uses PostScript for rendering, but doesn't convert to PDF.) Or you use Ghostscript directly
gs /path/to/PostScript.ps
But don't forget one thing: exactly because PostScript is a programming language, you can design PostScript files which are rather short in Bytes, but make the interpreter go through a loop with thousands of iterations (for example to compute + render a fractal) before it displays the file content on screen.
PDF doesn't have 'loops' and computations like that...
Here's a fractal in PS, which contains an infinite loop producing endless pdf pages. 3.1K produces 10's of Megabytes per page (too much for my Kindle).
– luser droog – 2013-09-14T07:11:31.100