Here’s the Deal

Sumatra PDF vs Evince

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When comparing Sumatra PDF vs Evince, the Slant community recommends Sumatra PDF for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF readers?” Sumatra PDF is ranked 2nd while Evince is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Sumatra PDF is:

Sumatra is available for free, licensed under GPL with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf).

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Common Questions

What are the best PDF readers?

What are the best alternatives to Adobe Reader?

Pros

Pro
Free and open source

Sumatra is available for free, licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.

Pro
Starts quickly

Pro
Low resource usage

Pro
Elegant interface

Pro
Does not have heavy editor features

Annotations and other heavy features are just not needed in reader.

Pro
Portable

The application consists of a single file that can be run without installation. You can put it on an external device, such as an usb thumb stick and run it on any Windows machine from the thumb stick.

Pro
Extensive keyboard shortcuts

Pro
Multilingual

It's available in 69 languages.

Pro
Free and open source software

Pro
Can annotate a pdf

It isn't immediately obvious how to do this, but the instructions are here.
As of 13 June 2018, the icons/screenshots on that page look different than what can be seen under Evince v3.18.2, but the devs have been alerted to this discrepancy, and there are requests they make the finding/using of annotations more intuitive than they are now.

Pro
Can find a word in a pdf

Pro
Supports touchpad gestures

Pro
Good integration with Gnome desktop

Pro
Supports touch interaction

Supports touch, including drag and pinch to zoom.

Pro
Can play embedded video

To my knowlegde, the only PDF reader on Linux that can play embeded video (unfortunately not in presentation mode, which is a major drawdack).

Pro
Search results list

Click/tap the magnifying class in the top bar.

Ad
Cons

Con
Lacking in features

Sumatra aims for simplicity at the expense of functionality. For example, there's no way to annotate PDFs or edit them.

Con
Windows only

Con
Fonts are not smooth enough

Not as smooth as e.g. Adobe Reader. No anti-aliasing

Con
Cannot crop empty fields

Just got used to this killing feature on Goodreader on Mac.

Con
Scrolling is not smooth

Con
Window can't be resized

You can only read in a small box or fullscreen, no way to manually size window.

Con
Tied to GNOME

Comes with all those weird things like popovers and clientside windows.

Con
Keyboard shortcuts cannot be rebound

Con
Thumbs not working

Scroll once, and all thumbs in the side panel are gone.

Con
Poor UI

Since version 3 it is almost unusable.

Con
Unicode Problems

Some languages other than English do not render correctly

Con
Adding annotations isn't as intuitive as it should be

Instructions can be found here. Specifically, a user should be able to select a word or block of text, then right-click and see highlight/add note options in the drop-down menu. Currently, this option isn't available (as of Evince v3.18.2 / 13th June 2018).