Archived thread 1432816 from Full Circle Magazine. Markdown source: Full_Circle_Magazine/thread_1432816_Favoured_PDF_reader.md
Having re-installed Karmic, I'm trying to *expunge* all the freedom-hating bloatware; that includes Adobe Reader.
Evince works fine, but is there a better open-source PDF reader?
(before you all shout Okular, I'm on Gnome without the stack of KDE libs installed) RC
xpdf, that's the one I'm using since forever.
I just use the default document viewer in Karmic...
Evince works fine. Far far better than adobe.
I find Evince works the best for me :)
Evince was crap in 10.04, it was slow and bloated (forever "loading"), but I was speechless in a good way in seeing how much it has improved in 10.10. A lot faster, very smooth and renders a lot better. I have been using Foxit Linux version as my default pdf reader in 10.04 just because of its speed and anti-aliasing feature,otherwise it has very few features,-- it is a poor cousin of the windows version. Now I would happily switch back to evince, it is comparable to Foxit in terms of speed (just a little bit slower) and rendering and have more features and supports a lot more document types. Moreover it seems that Foxit Linux version is practically dead (check their forums if you are interested)
It would be nice if evince supports tabs.
Adobe is crap as ever, it is ridiculous to have to download so many megabites just to view pdf and it is slow.
You can also run the windows version of Foxit or Pdf-Xchange viewer in WINE. These are light and feature rich pdf readers that I use in Windows, unfortunately I haven't found anything like that native in Linux, I would prefer not to run windows app unless I have to.
The most powerful one is PDFeditor but the Linux version is super buggy and running under wine is not great either. Actually Open Office Graphics works fairly well save for crashing every 10 minutes or so.
My favourite is Foxit even though I have seen threads here saying it won't run under Linux. It works perfectly in Puppy Linux and pretty well in Ubuntu. Copy and paste are a little weird as you sometimes have to select all and cnt -c then cnt-v to paste but it always works somehow. It is fast and almost never crashes.
Frank: agree about PDF Editor, very slow while it tries to pick its way through PDF layers (and fails most of the time). Gave up on it.
Tried Foxit for Linux, my review: http://catlingmindswipe.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-foxit-pdf-reader-11-for-linux.html
Foxit for Linux 1.1 has been out for a while (2009?) Very simple but crippled compared to the Windows version. I don't use WINE.
Looks like the much improved Evince is the favourite for now... RC
I prefer the Meercat (10,10), I've tried 11.4 and i'm not too sure I like Unity (just old-fashioned). I'll get used to it eventually. I'm also having a problem connecting to my wi-fi through this upgrade and eventually admitted defeat and re-installed my previous edition (10.10) again. Any help would be good since I do need to move on though I fancy Windows 3 and Firefox 4 is cool too! I might dual boot this main PC with Linux Mint 11 when it comes out as I want to use Libre-office and firefox4 :D again!:)
I started using Evince a few weeks ago and like most of it. I'd like to see some other features such as tabs and a way to close a file without closing the program. That is a pain when you are reading a series of PDFs. So far it is better than any other reader I've tried including Adobe. I've been using it to catch up on all the back issues of FCM which I had missed. Michael :guitar:
terabyte1 said: I prefer the Meercat (10,10), I've tried 11.4 and i'm not too sure I like Unity (just old-fashioned). I'll get used to it eventually. I'm also having a problem connecting to my wi-fi through this upgrade and eventually admitted defeat and re-installed my previous edition (10.10) again. Any help would be good since I do need to move on though I fancy Windows 3 and Firefox 4 is cool too! I might dual boot this main PC with Linux Mint 11 when it comes out as I want to use Libre-office and firefox4 :D again!:)
Hey TB:
Unity is for windows users basically. It is no sweat to just switch back to Gnome , That is what I did and I like 11.04 now. As far as Libre Office my experience with it so far is it is a slightly fancier version of Abiword. In my book nothing comes close to Softmaker . It does everything, actually is compatible with MS Office , is lightning fast ,the Softmaker Presentations {Power Point alternate} is hands down superior to MS and OO. it even does animations inside the slides, The 2008 version is free and the only drawback I see is you have to use a seperate converter for .docx files. The 2010 version is 70.00 for 3 licenses and it does docx. Neither does .pub but I never used that program anyway.
PDf Shuffler is handy for rearranging large files. I use it for insurance contracts. I run Lubuntu 10 on my old Tablet PC and open the application files in Xournal ,they are usually about 40 pages and fill out the contract with the digitqal pen and voila, I do not ever have to waste time and money printing apps or carrying all that paper around and then hoping the fax machine actually worked for once. All I have to do to bypass the passwords on the pdf files is by printing them to post script and then back to pdf. They sell programs to defeat the passwords on pdf files but print to file in Lubuntu has never been dazed by one yet. The older style security was bypassed with PDF editors but no more. The only thing I have not figured out is how to edit them later, it seems impossible. Adding text later is no problem , but changing it is . If anyone has an idea how I am all ears.
I have been also looking for a good pdf reader for linux, and I think that PDFStudio is a strong candidate. It is not free though, but could be useful for people that require a lot of functionalities.
Evince is my default, and it is just great. I'm using 10.04 and have never had issues with loading; although I do have 2gb of ram, which might have something to do with it. :) I have used Adobe reader, but find evince better and faster.
FWIW, I had a display problem in a PDF and thought I would try xpdf, just to see if it would make a difference. xpdf crashed immediately.
sudo apt-get remove xpdf :biggrin:
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