Difference between revisions of "PDF Viewers That Are Open Source"

Revision as of 20:41, 30 December 2014

Evince PDF

Windows, FreeBSD, Linux

Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats. The goal of evince is to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.

Evince currently supports PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex with gedit, comics books (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt), and many more.

Review: Evince opens PDF files into a well laid out reader. The DRM flag is ignored making Evince far more useful than Sumatra PDF or Adobe reader. Loading speed was similar to Sumatra. One notable glitch occurs when text is selected, the text becomes distorted. This can somewhat hinder text selection. It has been reported that the Windows version will only open PDF files. In our test on Microsoft Windows we confirmed Evince was unable to open .epub an eBook format.

The fact that Evince PDF is not handicapped by DRM restrictions makes it far more useful as a PDF reader when compared to Sumatra PDF. For this reason Evince is our choice for a Windows PDF reader.

An annoying flaw in Evidence costs it half a star. On some PDF documents when print is selected, the printer outputs only blank paper. Certain PDF files will not print correctly using Evince. This is a reoccurring problem. Ultimately this is a serious issue with Evidence and results in the software being inadequate.

Sumatra PDF

Microsoft Windows Only

A minimalistic PDF reader. Sumatra PDF has a minimalistic design, and its simplicity is attained at the expense of many other features. As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space - it has a 1mb setup file (compared to Adobe Reader's 27.5mb setup file), and it starts up rapidly. It was designed for portable use in the sense that it's just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive[1]. This would classify it as a portable application.

One interesting feature of Sumatra PDF is that it remembers exactly the last opened page for each pdf file. This helps it be a very useful pdf e-book reader.

Review: Sumatra PDF contains anti-features. It enforces DRM restrictions. As stated on a Sourceforge review, "it supports DRM of "protected" PDF files, and the author stubbornly refuses to make it optional. So you can't print PDFs for offline reading, and you can't copy text to the clipboard for pasting into Google translate, saving to your notes, quoting in a paper, etc."