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Which PDF-Viewer would you recommend to use in Ubuntu?

At the moment I use the standard document viewer (Evince) but I'm missing features like stageless continous zooming.

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Are there any other features you want other than continuous zooming? – fluteflute Dec 22 '10 at 13:08
Continuous Zooming would be the most important that i'm missing with the standart one. Fullscreen feature would be great but is not a must. Perhaps a nice and intuitive GUI for good usability experiences. – NES Dec 22 '10 at 13:16
In the default "Evince" viewer try pressing F5 / F11 for fullscreen features :) – fluteflute Dec 22 '10 at 13:20
Wasn't aware that this reader is called "Evince". Full screen feature is nice. But unfortunatly the zooming capabilities are less. – NES Dec 22 '10 at 13:24
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The word is "standard" and not "standart" – RolandiXor♦ Dec 22 '10 at 15:21

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9 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

Here are some good PDF readers:

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8  
Imho the list is useless without description what product has which benefit. For example xpdf loads pretty fast and allows to mark columnwise for copying content. – user unknown Apr 7 '12 at 21:50
up vote 17 down vote

Try okular Install okular. It's a KDE/Qt application, and it has some of the most awesome features of any reader.

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will give it a try. – NES Dec 22 '10 at 15:35
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It will also install a bunch of dependency of KDE..... – Ravi Apr 17 '12 at 14:20
up vote 6 down vote

Foxit is a free PDF document viewer for the Linux platform, with a new streamlined interface, user-customized toolbar, incredibly small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich features. This empowers PDF document users with Zoom function, Navigation function, Bookmarks, Thumbnails, Text Selection Tool, Snapshot, and Full Screen capabilities.

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thanks, will test it. – NES Dec 22 '10 at 15:35
Very fast viewer which I am using on Windows desktops at university. – Vincenzo Dec 22 '10 at 19:52
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Not as good as windows version. – crucified soul May 2 '11 at 12:07
up vote 6 down vote

I'm going to mention some lesser-known options: MuPDF and Zathura.

These are not feature rich, but they are super-fast, lightweight, and keyboard-driven. It's hard to believe how fast MuPDF is.

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thanks for the recommending, will test ti – NES Dec 23 '10 at 10:47
Unfortunately Linux "community" still didn't pick up MuPDF render engine to make fast and modern PDF viewer interface on top of it like Windows "community" did - SumatraPDF – zetah Dec 16 '11 at 23:59
up vote 2 down vote

In my opinion, qpdfview is the best PDF viewer for Ubuntu. Some of its attractive features are:

  • Fast opening of PDF files.
  • Great rendering of graphics.
  • Low memory consumption.
  • Tab browsing.
  • Annotations.

qpdfview is available via a Launchpad ppa.

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up vote 1 down vote

Try Adobe's own Adobe Reader 9

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I don't like the Adobe one very much. I know it from windows. – NES Dec 22 '10 at 13:17
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Adobes acrobat is very good on linux though, it even has tabs! – RolandiXor♦ Dec 22 '10 at 15:19
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It's incredibly, almost unbelievably slow. – frabjous Dec 22 '10 at 21:51
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It is the worst PDF reader even in Windows I don't use it! – Ravi Apr 17 '12 at 14:22
up vote 1 down vote

Nobody mentioned wine + PDF-XChange Viewer? This is a great solution if you want to annotate pdf files under Linux. Detailed discussion can be found here.

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up vote 1 down vote

Google Chrome can render PDFs, has a zoom feature, and you might already have it installed.

I have seen some PDFs that give evince trouble (large sections of the document will be blacked out), but Chrome displays them just fine.

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up vote -1 down vote

I can contribute just a bit: I think I use to have some printing problems acroread because it's using its own printing configuration instead of calling the linux printing manager... Well it was a while ago, not sure the problem still exists...

Actually mainly I wanted to push the question further: I used to work on Adobe Reader Pro, which has a bunch of fancy features to which I kind of got addicted:

  • comments / highlighting / draw on the pdf,
  • character's recognition (very usefull when the PDF is actually more like a jpg picture of an old document :p),
  • fuse documents

and probably some others I never used... Pb: Adobe Pro, is not free and I don't know if it exist in linux version (at least my company has it only for Mac and Windows)... Do some of the aforementioned viewers have some of those options;

  • I would like to know if the comments/highlighting/drawings are compatible from one viewer to the other... For example I used to highlight some text with adobe pro, and when opening the doc with an other viewer (evince? not sure anymore), the original text was not visible anymore under the "highlighting".

On my synaptic I also see: - viewpdf.app - apvlv - pdfcube (!!!! 3d pdfs?)

any feedback on them would be welcome too...

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1  
This doesn't really seem to answer the question. – jrg♦ Apr 24 '12 at 13:42

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