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Add to SafariWhen comparing Evince vs Okular, the Slant community recommends Okular for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for Linux?” Okular is ranked 1st while Evince is ranked 5th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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 Search results list
Click/tap the magnifying class in the top bar.
Pro Can find a word in a pdf
Pro Good SEARCH
Evince remained my preferred viewer due to the excellent presentation of results in the whole document when performing a search. It is so good, that it makes me tolerate the silly "hamburger" (CSD) foolishness.
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 Featureful
Pro Trim margins
Easily trim margins either automatically or manually for easier reading
Pro Free and open source
Pro Supports touch interaction
Pro Table selection
Pro Tabbed view option
Cons
Con Scrolling is not smooth
Con Poor UI
Since version 3 it is almost unusable.
Con Bugs that never get fixed
Irritating bugs that never get fixed (such as starting scrolling randomly when moving mouse around) and devs that don't care.
Con Tied to GNOME
Comes with all those weird things like popovers and clientside windows.
Con Slow to open PDFs
Con CSD - Why do you need to search for stuff you know is there... somewhere.
MS thought it was smart to remove "Start" buttons. With CSD, devs thought it would be good for productivity to play hide and seek with standard functions. And Evince regrettably is also riding that wave. It is that Evince has a superior (whole document) search result presentation and that its function is pretty simple and straight forward (read, search), that it makes me tolerate the silly "hamburger" (CSD) foolishness. If Atril (no CSD) would have similar search result output, a switch over would be just one heartbeat away...
Con Window can't be resized
You can only read in a small box or fullscreen, no way to manually size window.
Con Keyboard shortcuts cannot be rebound
Con Thumbs not working
Scroll once, and all thumbs in the side panel are gone.
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).
Con Requires many KDE libraries
Con Poor HiDPI support
You may have to tinker with QT__SCALE_FACTOR environment variables to get the desired size and not blurry content (this is a bug; see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362856 and https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54688)
Con No search results overview
You have to navigate to next/previous hit one by one
Con No XFA Adobe Forms support
Cannot fill PDF Forms created with Adobe.
Con No "fit to page" option under printing settings
You can only print the content as given so, when you receive a bigger or smaller image thant the default of the printer, you will have to edit it first on other editor.
Con Slow scroll
Its new ultra-slow-scroll for PgUp and PgDn makes it unuseable.
Con No middle-mouse auto-scrolling
Instead of scrolling automatically when holding down the mouse wheel and dragging, it instead zooms in or out, in contrast with many other programs.
