Everyone,
In case you happen to be using the supplied GBM plugin (for image scaling), by default the lugbm.cfg file is set to use the 'scaler=simple' setting...however, there are numerous other options one can pick, and while not all of them are documented in the supplied documentation, there are some decent web resources out there.
As I did that, I came across the following site =>
https://clouard.users.greyc.fr/Pantheon/experiments/rescaling/index-en.html that does a pretty nice job of illustrating the differences given actual up/down-scale samples.
Subsequently I've changed my config to use 'scaler=lanczos', which seems to have made a difference in terms of viewing various PDFs, as not all of them are true PDF text documents and many are image scans that were published as PDF doc.
Just thought I would share...likewise, if you have tried the remaining scalar options (catmullrom,blackman,kaiser) I'm curious what your results have been like.
Best to everyone in the meantime!
-Dariusz