I often find these questions very useful. Just because it is not a clear cut answer I don't think they need to be closed. Its hard to give an unbiased opinion but you often get a quick survey with such type of Q&A.
Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 23:25 Maybe move to the software recommendation forum instead of closing? Commented May 23, 2016 at 13:32Pdf.js works fine in Firefox. I was able to view and print document in Russian language which used Microsoft fonts. I was not able to do same from other viewers native viewers.
Commented Sep 13, 2016 at 15:10 Please stop closing questions as non-constructive, if they get hundreds of upvotes. Commented Dec 21, 2017 at 10:39Foxit is a good and feature-rich PDF reader. Moreover Foxit is available for Windows too. You can connect the software to the cloud to sync your changes to a document accross multiple devices, be it Windows or Ununtu. I'd suggest going with it. You can download it from the official website: foxitsoftware.com/downloads If you need help installing it, here's a guide that might help: ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/09/… Hope it helps.
Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 18:26Imho the list is useless without description what product has which benefit. For example xpdf loads pretty fast and allows to mark columnwise for copying content.
Commented Apr 7, 2012 at 21:50 evince sucks. Try searching some words in it and you'll see it eating upto 1 GB memory. Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 16:20 okular allows you to zoom at 1600%. Great for inspecting graphics. Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 14:40I tried xpdf - it displayed then dumped core. Then tried evince which couldn't find files it was looking for and didn't display anything other that messages to stderr. Then tried gv which worked fine. Give me old that works to new that doesn't any day of the week.
Commented May 16, 2016 at 14:47 At least Foxit Reader, Master PDF, lately Okular DO provide advanced capabilities. Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 8:27In my opinion, qpdfview is the best PDF viewer for Ubuntu. Some of its attractive features are:
qpdfview can be installed from the official repositories with the command
sudo apt install qpdfview It is also available via a Launchpad ppa.
community wikiThis one gets my vote for not only being incredibly customizable, but especially for offering an outline of the PDF chapters on the left. A side panel of links to the various chapters in the PDF, that is. OS X's default PDF reader does this, and I wanted it on Linux. i.imgur.com/vnslr3J.png
Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 13:26The best imo too. It's fast, there are plenty of shortcuts and they're quick to setup, it uses tabs, supports annotations and links to pages (e.g. from the index to the beginning of a chapter). For highlights and annotations I use PDF XChange Editor under Wine, but for reading this one's a very good all-arounder. I've tried also Evince, Okular, xpdf, MuPDF and Zathura but none of these I've found as complete and fast as qpdf (even though I liked Zathura..). Thanks for the suggestion!
Commented Oct 3, 2015 at 10:22Very good one, but it misses an important feature when working with big pdfs: Find with whole-word-only option. AFAIK, Only FoxitReader has it, but unfortunately it is quite bad on many other points.
Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 12:36To select text in qpdfview you have to hold SHIFT. While selecting text, no (temporary) highlighting occurs, only a bounding box appears. Other than this, it seems good.
Commented Mar 16, 2018 at 15:41Besides the unintuitive text selection mechanism, and inability to fill forms, qpdfview seems abandoned, with the last release in July 2019?
Commented Jan 23, 2021 at 0:26I'm going to mention some lesser-known options: MuPDF and Zathura.
These are not feature rich, but they are super-fast, lightweight, and keyboard-driven. It's hard to believe how fast MuPDF is.
community wikiUnfortunately Linux "community" still didn't pick up MuPDF render engine to make fast and modern PDF viewer interface on top of it like Windows "community" did - SumatraPDF
Commented Dec 16, 2011 at 23:59 MuPDF is really fast! Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 15:30I had to see how fast is MuPDF, and it is pretty much instant. Very impressive. Thanks for the suggestion.
Commented Nov 1, 2014 at 19:41 Zathura shines for those, who like vim-like key-binding. It took me a year to find it. Commented Apr 10, 2015 at 17:07If anyone else is looking for a PDF viewer for opening large graphics/scientific plots, I have had a much better experience with PDF-XChange and Sumatra via wine than with mupdf or zathura. I tested this with a ~3 MB file with thousands of individual objects (many scatter plots). For the linux native viewers, okular was the fastest ahead of qpdfview and the refreshed evince. Still, nothing comes close to Sumatra in speed, and you can run the portable version directly via wine, highly recommended!
Commented May 23, 2016 at 13:32Try okular. It's a KDE/Qt application, and it has some of the most awesome features of any reader.
community wiki It will also install a bunch of dependency of KDE. Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 14:20That's right, but if you have or plan to have other KDE apps (and there are good ones) they will be needed anyway. And okular is so much better than evince (what cannot be?) that it's worth it!
Commented May 31, 2014 at 9:29 it is too slow while opening and scrolling big pdfs, finally i had to shift to qpdfviwer Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 11:10 Not great for printing, though: askubuntu.com/q/1222090/457111 Commented Apr 20, 2020 at 1:54 It's not supporting GTK3/4 and I hate it for that! Commented Sep 17, 2021 at 11:48Google Chrome can render PDFs, has a zoom feature, and you might already have it installed.
I have seen some PDFs that give evince trouble (large sections of the document will be blacked out), but Chrome displays them just fine.
community wiki It is also very fast on complex pdfs. Commented Nov 6, 2014 at 11:24Beware! Chrome will let you fill out forms but won't actually save the data (unlike eg. Evince or qPDF).
Commented Dec 28, 2014 at 9:03 Mozilla Firefox can also render PDFs. :) Commented May 27, 2015 at 21:55 No case sensitive search! Commented Feb 17, 2017 at 9:56@MuhamedHuseinbašić at askubuntu.com/questions/18495/… I summarize why I think Firefox is the best option as of 2018.
Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 14:32Foxit is a free PDF document viewer for the Linux platform, with a new streamlined interface, user-customized toolbar, incredibly small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich features. This empowers PDF document users with Zoom function, Navigation function, Bookmarks, Thumbnails, Text Selection Tool, Snapshot, and Full Screen capabilities.
community wiki Very fast viewer which I am using on Windows desktops at university. Commented Dec 22, 2010 at 19:52 Not as good as windows version. Commented May 2, 2011 at 12:07Unfortunately the last version 1.1 (as of 2013-08-08) was released in 2009-08-13. foxitsoftware.com/company/…
Commented Aug 8, 2013 at 10:50 But it's still faster than some of linux viewers (on large pages) Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 14:54 The Linux version doesn't have full screen mode somehow :-/ The Windows one does Commented Jun 19, 2016 at 21:55Firefox
As of Ubuntu 18.04, Firefox 62 is, in my opinion, the best PDF viewer available on Linux.
It's PDF support is based on the PDF.js project which is maintained by Mozilla itself and integrated in to Firefox out-of-the-box.
Firefox comes pre-installed on Ubuntu 18.04, which makes it specially convenient.
You can open a PDF simply as:
firefox ~/path/to/my.pdf and it opens the PDF on a tab in the browser.
Or it will open by default if you click a PDF web link with Firefox.
Opening new documents on tabs is great, as it makes it easier to switch between multiple documents, given Ubuntu's clunky tab switching.
Furthermore, as in most browsers, you can start writing the document name on the address bar to find it easily with auto-complete.
As a test case, test it out with the humongous 5k page Intel x86 manual:
I consider Firefox the best due to the unacceptable downsides of other viewers I've tried so far for reading technical documents:
Other more acceptable viewers with less important downsides:
Firefox is able to read the complex format known as a PDF Package where many files are bound together. This format is otherwise impenetrable by other readers. * qpdfview * evince * LibreOffice Draw * Brave Browser (Chromium based)
Commented Apr 28, 2022 at 23:57 briliant solution! Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 1:27Nobody mentioned wine + PDF-XChange Viewer? This is a great solution if you want to annotate pdf files under Linux. Detailed discussion can be found here on gnurou.org or here on blogspot.com.
community wikii use wine+foxit . that works great too. in my experience foxit handles annotations in some scanned+OCRred PDFs better.
Commented Jun 19, 2014 at 15:48It seems to me like I can't use the printer's advanced properties (e.g. fold the booklets for me) with wine. Something something driver. ?
Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 13:23 This is Windows-only, right? The link is now dead. Commented Jan 23, 2021 at 0:25@DanDascalescu: PDF-XChange is Windows-only, thus comes Wine for the "rescue". The original link is indeed dead now. I find a new site hosting the article.
Commented Jan 24, 2021 at 21:31PDF Studio Viewer is a free PDF reader for Linux. It's easy to install as it is packaged as a single file with no dependencies, etc. It has advanced viewing options (pan and zoom, screenshot, rulers & grids, thumbnail tab, digital signature tabs, bookmark tab, layer tab), printing options (preview, booklet) and search options (search within fields, annotations, recursively into folders, etc..). It can annotate PDF documents with graphical, text and markup annotations. It can fill & save interactive forms.
community wikiUnfortunately, all of the PDF readers I've tested on Linux lack fundamental functionalities, which is rather frustrating if you are a feature-dependent user.
Hence, instead of giving you several alternatives that you will end up finding a limitation, I will point out the drawbacks of each PDF reader I've tested so far to keep you from wasting time.
PS1: I do not take through each program. Maybe some of these functionalities are present, and I didn't set them up correctly.
PS2: I will edit this post as I test more PDF readers.
