When comparing qpdfview vs Atril, the Slant community recommends Atril for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” Atril is ranked 2nd while qpdfview is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Atril is:
It is a straight port of the GNOME2 Evince to GTK3 without sacrificing its UI like Evince 3 did. It also has all the cool stuff that professional apps need, like: Menubars, editable Toolbars, Menus with Icons, Menus with keyboard shortcuts.
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Pros
Pro Low on resources
Pro Reloads on changes instantly
Pro Outline, properties and thumbnail panes
Pro Open multiple pdfs in tabs
qpdfview is a tabbed document viewer.
Pro Allows for some scripting
Opens files in named instances, open files on designated page.
Calling of userscripts on a document is thus far not possible.
Pro Fast search in all opened files
Pro Dark mode
However only inverted colors.
Pro Scale, rotate and fit
Pro Supports TOC-sidebar
Pro Switch tabs with keyboard shortcuts
Pro Continuous and multiple-page layouts
Pro Add highlights and text annotations
Pro DjVu support
Pro Fullscreen and presentation views
Pro PostScript support
Pro Custom background colors
Pro Multiplatform
It is available on any major computer OS.
Pro Deactivation of GUI elements
e.g.:
toggleMenuBar
toggleToolBars
Pro Supports thumbnail preview
Pro Input forms are editable
Pro No GNOME3
It is a straight port of the GNOME2 Evince to GTK3 without sacrificing its UI like Evince 3 did. It also has all the cool stuff that professional apps need, like: Menubars, editable Toolbars, Menus with Icons, Menus with keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Great Evince fork
It has been forked when Evince was still good.
Cons
Con Deadly slow on complex pdf files
Con File information missing page size
Con No multiple mapping of commands
For example:
moveDown=Down
moveLeft=Shift+Left
moveRight=Shift+Right
moveUp=Up
Having two key mappings to execute the moveUp command doesn't seem to be possible.
Con Configuration intended via GUI
There is no explicit documentation of configuration parameters used in qpdfview.conf and shortcuts.conf (those are the most important ones). However the files are editable conveniently, which is of value.
Con Disappointing search
In comparison with its origin, Evince, the search results in Atril is disappointing. You can search, but only locates your search term per page, the one you're located on. Want to find it elsewhere? Search all pages one by one, page by page. Hence, I personally, working/ searching in large pdfs, therefore prefer Evince, which does give you the search result for the whole document. Apart from this, Atril seems a great piece of (fork) work.
Con Some GTK dependecy
It needs GTK+ and its dependencies.
