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Add to SafariWhen comparing Zathura vs KDE Okular, the Slant community recommends KDE Okular for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” KDE Okular is ranked 1st while Zathura is ranked 3rd.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Free and open source
Pro Trim margins
Easily trim margins either automatically or manually for easier reading
Pro Featureful
Pro Table selection
Pro Tabbed view option
Pro Supports touch interaction
Cons
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.
Con No XFA Adobe Forms support
Cannot fill PDF Forms created with Adobe.
Con Requires many KDE libraries
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.
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 "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.
