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Add to SafariWhen comparing Evince vs Zathura, the Slant community recommends Zathura for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” Zathura is ranked 3rd while Evince is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Zathura is:
Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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 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 Link preview on hover
Evince shows a popup with the preview of the target of links in the same document. This is extremely useful e.g. for links to the bibliography or for references to definitions/propositions/equations in math texts.
Pro Free and open source software
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 Lightweight
Zathura is fast and can open a pdf file almost instantly.
Pro Clean interface
Inferface is clean and shows only a small statusbar.
Pro Vim bindings
You can browse files via keyboard, using keyboard commands similar to vim (text editor).
Pro Automatic document reloading
Zathura will automatically refresh the view when a document has been modified. (By contrast, Chrome requires a manual refresh and brings you back to the top of the document so that you have to scroll back down).
Pro Default page layout always same and predictable
No unpredictable window opening behavior like Atril. Together with it's easy ways to scroll and zoom, zathura is perfect for fast look through lots of PDFs
Pro Detailed adjustment of dark mode
- recolor-darkcolor
- recolor-lightcolor
- recolor-keephue
- recolor-reverse-video
(see manpage zathurarc)
Also, proper dark mode: colors are grayscaled not inverted.
Pro Deactivation of all GUI elements
Pro Very detailed adjustment of page layout
For example:
- pages-per-row 3 (3 pages next to each other)
- first-page-column 3:1 (for 3 page column layout: first page is on the left)
- page-right-to-left false (2nd and 3rd page are shown right to the 1st)
Unfortunately I haven't found a way yet to map these commands to a key. The ability to prefix a shortcut with a number argument would lend itself perfectly to achieve what I had in mind.
Pro Call userscripts on document
For example:
map <C-l> exec "termite -c ./termite_config --class float -e 'tmux new-session /bin/ranger $(dirname "%")'"
<C-l> opens ranger with directory containing the opened document
Other ideas:
- extract pages
- print pages
Pro Good documentation of configuration options
See man page "zathura".
Pro Multiple tabs via tabbed
https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
But unlike qpdfview search will only operate on one tab instance.
Cons
Con Keyboard shortcuts cannot be rebound
Con Scrolling is not smooth
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 Poor UI
Since version 3 it is almost unusable.
Con Can't delete pages
No Hand Tool. Automatic Zoom broken.
You have to boot in to windows to have a decent PDF reader.
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 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 No annotation support
Con No thumbnail view
Unlike qpdfview, okular and evince, which have it.
Con Input forms are not editable
qpdfview, okular and evince do this.
