Add to ChromeWhen comparing Sumatra PDF vs Evince, the Slant community recommends Sumatra PDF for most people. In the question“What are the best alternatives to Adobe Reader?” Sumatra PDF is ranked 4th while Evince is ranked 5th. 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).
Question Ranking
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 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 Elegant interface
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 Good integration with Gnome desktop
Pro Supports touchpad gestures
Pro Supports touch interaction
Supports touch, including drag and pinch to zoom.
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 Keyboard shortcuts cannot be rebound
Con Thumbs not working
Scroll once, and all thumbs in the side panel are gone...
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 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).
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