HACKER Q&A
📣 alderz

Which PDF reader do you use on Linux?


I read a lot of PDFs, and I cannot find a good reader on Linux. Evince does not support tabs and has no history navigation (back/forward). Qpdfviewer does have those features, but lacks proper text selection. Okular requires a big installation and KDE libraries, which are fine if you use KDE, but I don't. There are many other minimal readers, but they are too basic for my needs. Session persistence in a PDF reader would be nice too.

Which one do you use? How do you like it?

I think there is big room for improvement in this space. Nothing comes close to PDFExpert on the iPad...


  👤 emilsedgh Accepted Answer ✓
Okular requires a big installation and KDE libraries, which are fine if you use KDE, but I don't.

I don't understand this argument. On Windows and Mac you install apps which come statically built against tens of libraries and you're fine with it.

Yet on Linux, it's such a big deal if an app uses a few libraries (which are reused by tens of different apps).

> I cannot find a good reader on Linux

It's called Okular. You just have some stigma against installing a few megabytes of libraries.


👤 ColinWright
I have this in a script:

    nice firefox -private -new-window $*