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What PDF readers on linux are 'best recommended'? I compared acroread with evince and kpdf in the past and found that acroread was the most parsimonious in use

What PDF readers on linux are 'best recommended'? I compared acroread with evince and kpdf in the past and found that acroread was the most parsimonious in use of resources (especially RAM on large documents). Have not repeated the comparison recently, so will be glad to hear about recommendations with more recent experiences with large documents with images.

replax 12y ago
Personally, i prefer "zathura". besides filling out forms it can do everything, with a very sleek ui and outstanding keybindings (vim-esque). I encourage you to try it :)
- nextos 12y ago
  It's a fantastic piece of software. It can use different backends (mupdf or poppler) and it can also deal with DjVu files.
falcor84 12y ago
Firefox's builtin pdf.js reader has really matured and I switched to using it as my primary reader. It's even good enough for me to read books since it remembers the location I'm on, even if the browser process dies horribly.
cturner 12y ago
One that's easy to overlook - just open in google chrome.
- fafner 12y ago
  I absolutely dislike the pdf viewer in Chrome. It fails at even the basic things a pdf reader should support. E.g., it lacks a concept of pages. You can't jump to a certain page. You can't even know the total number of pages. It doesn't support the pdf's TOC. For any pdf which contains more than one page it is therefore useless. I can't understand how the Google folks ever thought this was a good idea. I prefer Okular or Evince for Desktop viewing and pdf.js for in browser viewing. pdf.js is a bit slow when loading the pdf. But the user interface is quite nice in my opinion.
  - ubercow13 12y ago
    On the other hand its one of the (or the? at least last I checked) only pdf readers on Linux which supports subpixel rendering of text and other vector content, which makes documents much more easily readable in my opinion.
leni536 12y ago
I use mupdf. It has a quite minimal user interface but it's fast and has really good rendering. It's written by the ghostscript guys.
pera 12y ago
llpp is lovely: http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git
sho_hn 12y ago
Just some general info: Evince and Okular (the successor to kpdf) both use poppler under the hood (which is maintained/released by the Okular maintainer), so their performance and behavior will be somewhat similar, though you can make a difference at the app level with things like tiled rendering and smarter prefetching. I'm not on top of how the two compare there, though. Okular also has pluggable backends and there's an in-development mupdf backend around.
MegaDeKay 12y ago
I also use Okular. It has recently gotten support for keeping multiple documents in tabs rather than separate windows. However, I find it to be slow when searching big documents and slow to render large graphics in a page.
rickisen 12y ago
I like apvlv. Very vim like. you can even split with :s and do a lot of cool stuff.

replax 12y ago

Personally, i prefer "zathura". besides filling out forms it can do everything, with a very sleek ui and outstanding keybindings (vim-esque). I encourage you to try it :)

nextos 12y ago
It's a fantastic piece of software. It can use different backends (mupdf or poppler) and it can also deal with DjVu files.

falcor84 12y ago

Firefox's builtin pdf.js reader has really matured and I switched to using it as my primary reader. It's even good enough for me to read books since it remembers the location I'm on, even if the browser process dies horribly.

cturner 12y ago

One that's easy to overlook - just open in google chrome.

fafner 12y ago
I absolutely dislike the pdf viewer in Chrome. It fails at even the basic things a pdf reader should support. E.g., it lacks a concept of pages. You can't jump to a certain page. You can't even know the total number of pages. It doesn't support the pdf's TOC. For any pdf which contains more than one page it is therefore useless. I can't understand how the Google folks ever thought this was a good idea. I prefer Okular or Evince for Desktop viewing and pdf.js for in browser viewing. pdf.js is a bit slow when loading the pdf. But the user interface is quite nice in my opinion.
- ubercow13 12y ago
  On the other hand its one of the (or the? at least last I checked) only pdf readers on Linux which supports subpixel rendering of text and other vector content, which makes documents much more easily readable in my opinion.

leni536 12y ago

I use mupdf. It has a quite minimal user interface but it's fast and has really good rendering. It's written by the ghostscript guys.

pera 12y ago

llpp is lovely: http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git

sho_hn 12y ago

Just some general info: Evince and Okular (the successor to kpdf) both use poppler under the hood (which is maintained/released by the Okular maintainer), so their performance and behavior will be somewhat similar, though you can make a difference at the app level with things like tiled rendering and smarter prefetching. I'm not on top of how the two compare there, though. Okular also has pluggable backends and there's an in-development mupdf backend around.

MegaDeKay 12y ago

I also use Okular. It has recently gotten support for keeping multiple documents in tabs rather than separate windows. However, I find it to be slow when searching big documents and slow to render large graphics in a page.

rickisen 12y ago

I like apvlv. Very vim like. you can even split with :s and do a lot of cool stuff.