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Pympress is a simple yet powerful PDF reader designed for dual-screen presentations

Cimbali/pympress

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What is pympress.

Pympress is a PDF presentation tool designed for dual-screen setups such as presentations and public talks. Highly configurable, fully-featured, and portable

It comes with many great features ( more below ):

supports embedded gifs (out of the box), videos, and audios (with VLC or Gstreamer integration)
text annotations displayed in the presenter window
natively supports beamer's notes on second screen , as well as Libreoffice notes pages!

Pympress is a free software, distributed under the terms of the GPL license (version 2 or, at your option, any later version).

Pympress was originally created and maintained by Schnouki , on his repo .

You can get pympress from the pympress COPR repo of your system. With yum or dnf, simply do:

With zypper, fetch the link of the .repo in the table at the bottom of the COPR page and add it as a source.

Or using any other tool to manage AUR packages (yay, pacaur, etc.):

Or download the latest installer from the latest Github release .

If you get an error message along the lines of "MSVCP100.dll is missing", get the Visual C++ 2010 redistributables from Microsoft ( x86 (32 bit) or x64 (64 bits) ). Those libraries really should already be installed on your system.

Make sure you have all the dependencies . (These are already included in binary packages or their dependencies.)

If your python environment lacks the Gobject Introspections module, try

using --system-site-packages for pipx or virtual environments ,
installing pygobject and pycairo with pipx ( pipx inject pympress pygobject pycairo ), which requires the correct development/header packages be present on your system. See the PyPI installation instructions of PyGObject for your system .

As per the python documentation on installing , it is recommended to install packages in virtual environments. Since mid 2022, the pipx tool automates this process. Your distribution (or Homebrew on macOS) should have a version you can install. Alternately, you can get the same effect with the standard venv and pip modules:

If you don’t want to use system packages, you can build and install pygobject/pycairo in the virtual environment using ~/.local/lib/venv/bin/pip install pygobject pycairo
You can adjust the ~/.local/lib/venv/ path to your personal preference.

Unfortunately, installing pympress in a virtual environment means you will not get desktop integration (i.e. installing pympress' desktop and png files to have pympress show up in your menus etc).

This is by design , as desktop applications are intended to be installed through system packages (rpm, apt, etc.). You can work around this in 2 ways:

Manually (note that links/copied files will need to be removed): cp " ` pipx environment -V PIPX_LOCAL_VENVS ` /pympress/share/applications/io.github.pympress.desktop " ~ /.share/applications/ ln -s " ` pipx environment -V PIPX_LOCAL_VENVS ` /pympress/share/pixmaps/pympress.png " ~ /.share/pixmaps/
Relying on the deprecated data_files, that only work outside of virtual environments . This means installing with pip : python3 -m pip install --user --break-system-packages pympress

To support playing embedded videos in the PDFs, your system must have VLC installed (with the same bitness as pympress). VLC is not distributed with pympress, but it is certainly available in your system’s package manager and on their website .

Opening a file

Simply start Pympress and it will ask you what file you want to open. You can also start pympress from the command line with a file to open like so: pympress slides.pdf or python3 -m pympress slides.pdf

Functionalities

All functionalities are available from the menus of the window with slide previews. Don't be afraid to experiment with them!

Keyboard shortcuts are also listed in these menus. Some more usual shortcuts are often available, for example Ctrl + L , and F11 also toggle fullscreen, though the main shortcut is just F .

A few of the fancier functionalities are listed here:

Two-screen display : See on your laptop or tablet display the current slide, the next slide, the talk time and wall-clock time, and annotations (either PDF annotations, beamer notes on second slide, or Libreoffice notes pages). The position of the beamer or Libreoffice notes in the slide is detected automatically and can be overridden via a menu option.

If you do not want to use second-slide beamer notes but prefer to have notes on their own pages, you can enable auto-detection of these notes. Use the following snippet that prefixes the page labels with notes: on notes pages:

Media support : supports playing video, audio, and gif files embedded in (or linked from) the PDF file, with optional start/end times and looping.

Highlight mode : Allows one to draw freehand on the slide currently on screen.

Go To Slide : To jump to a selected slide without flashing through the whole presentation on the projector, press G or click the "current slide" box. Using J or clicking the slide label will allow you to navigate slide labels instead of page numbers, useful e.g. for multi-page slides from beamer \pause .

A spin box will appear, and you will be able to navigate through your slides in the presenter window only by scrolling your mouse, with the Home / Up / Down / End keys, with the + and - buttons of the spin box, or simply by typing in the number of the slide. Press Enter to validate going to the new slide or Esc to cancel.

Deck Overview : Pressing D will open an overview of your whole slide deck, and any slide can be opened from can simply clicking it.

Software pointer : Clicking on the slide (in either window) while holding ctrl down will display a software laser pointer on the slide. Or press L to permanently switch on the laser pointer.

Talk time breakdown : The Presentation > Timing Breakdown menu item displays a breakdown of how much time was spent on each slide, with a hierarchical breakdown per chapters/sections/etc. if available in the PDF.

Automatic file reloading : If the file is modified, pympress will reload it (and preserve the current slide, current time, etc.)

Big button mode : Add big buttons (duh) for touch displays.

Swap screens : If Pympress mixed up which screen is the projector and which is not, press S

Automatic full screen : pympress will automatically put the content window fullscreen on your non-primary screen when:

connecting a second screen,
extending your desktop to a second screen that was mirroring your main screen,
when starting pympress on a two-screen display. To disable this behaviour, untick “Content fullscreen” under the “Starting configuration” menu.

Estimated talk time : Click the Time estimation box and set your planned talk duration. The color will allow you to see at a glance how much time you have left.

Adjust screen centering : If your slides' form factor doesn't fit the projectors' and you don't want the slide centered in the window, use the "Screen Center" option in the "Presentation" menu.

Resize Current/Next slide : You can drag the bar between both slides on the Presenter window to adjust their relative sizes to your liking.

Caching : For efficiency, Pympress caches rendered pages (up to 200 by default). If this is too memory consuming for you, you can change this number in the configuration file.

Configurability : Your preferences are saved in a configuration file, and many options are accessible there directly. These include:

Customisable key bindings (or shortcuts),
Configurable layout of the presenter window, with 1 to 16 next slides preview
and many more.

See the configuration file documentation for more details,

Editable PDF annotations : Annotations can be added, removed, or changed, and the modified PDF files can be saved

Automatic next slide and looping

Command line arguments

-h, --help : Shows a list of all command line arguments.
-t mm[:ss], --talk-time=mm[:ss] : The estimated (intended) talk time in minutes and optionally seconds.
-n position, --notes=position : Set the position of notes on the pdf page (none, left, right, top, bottom, or after). Overrides the detection from the file.
--log=level : Set level of verbosity in log file (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR).

Media and autoplay

To enable media playback, you need to have either:

Gstreamer installed (enabled by default), with its gtk plugin ( libgstgtk ) which is sometimes packaged separately (e.g. as gst-plugin-gtk or gstreamer1.0-gtk3 ), and plugins gstreamer-good/-bad/-ugly based on which codecs you need, or
VLC installed (and the python-vlc module), with enabled = on under the [vlc] section of your config file.

On macOS, issues with the gstreamer brew formula may require users to set GST_PLUGIN_SYSTEM_PATH manually. For default homebrew configurations the value should be /opt/homebrew/lib/gstreamer-1.0/ . Make sure to set this environmental variable globally, or pympress might not pick it up.

To produce PDFs with media inclusion, the ideal method is to use beamer’s multimedia package, always with \movie :

If you desire autoplay, ensure you have pympress ≥ 1.7.0 and poppler ≥ 21.04, and use the movie15 package as follows:

Dependencies

Pympress relies on:

Python (version ≥ 3.4, python 2.7 is supported only until pympress 1.5.1, and 3.x < 3.4 until v1.6.4).
Poppler , the PDF rendering library.
Cairo (and python bindings for cairo), the graphics library which is used to pre-render and draw over PDF pages.
Gdk, a lower-level graphics library to handle icons.
Introspection bindings for poppler may be shipped separately, ensure you have those as well ( typelib-1_0-Poppler-0_18 on OpenSUSE, gir1.2-poppler-0.18 on Ubuntu)
optionally VLC , to play videos (with the same bitness as Python) and the python-vlc bindings.
optionally Gstreamer to play videos (which is a Gtk library)

On linux platforms

The dependencies are often installed by default, or easily available through your package or software manager. For example, on ubuntu, you can run the following as root to make sure you have all the prerequisites assuming you use python3 :

Different distributions might have different package naming conventions, for example the equivalent on OpenSUSE would be:

On CentOS/RHEL/Fedora the dependencies would be:

And on Arch Linux:

Dependencies can be installed using Homebrew :

The binary installer for windows comes with pympress and all its dependencies packaged.

Alternately, in order to install from pypi or from source on windows, there are two ways to get the dependencies:

using MSYS2 (replace x86_64 with i686 if you're using a 32 bit machine).

Warning: this can take a substantial amount of disk size as it requires a full software distribution and building platform.

This is also the strategy used to automate builds on appveyor .

Using PyGobjectWin32. Be sure to check the supported Python versions (up to 3.4 at the time of writing) , they appear in the FEATURES list in the linked page.

Install native python for windows
Get GTK+3, Poppler and their python bindings by executing the PyGi installer . Be sure to tick all the necessary dependencies in the installer (Poppler, Cairo, Gdk-Pixbuf).

Alternately, you can build your Gtk+3 stack from source using MSVC, see the Gnome wiki and this python script that compiles the whole Gtk+3 stack . This strategy has not been used successfully yet, due to problems building Poppler with its introspection bindings (i.e. typelib) − see #109 .

Contributing

Feel free to clone this repo and use it, modify it, redistribute it, etc, under the GPLv2+. A number of contributors have taken part in the development of pympress and submitted pull requests to improve it.

Be respectful of everyone and keep this community friendly, welcoming, and harassment-free. Abusive behaviour will not be tolerated, and can be reported by email at [email protected] − wrongdoers may be permanently banned.

Pympress has inline sphinx documentation ( Google style , contains rst syntax), and the docs generated from it are hosted on the github pages of this repo .

Translations

We thank the many contributors of translations: Agnieszka, atsuyaw, Cherrywoods, Dongwang, Estel-f, Fabio Pagnotta, Ferdinand Fichtner, Frederik. blome, FriedrichFröbel, GM, He. yifan. xs, Jaroslav Svoboda, Jeertmans, Kristýna, lazycat, Leonvincenterd, LogCreative, Lorenzo. pacchiardi, Luis Sibaja, Marcin Dohnalik, marquitul, Morfit, Mzn, Nico, Ogawa, Paul, Pierre BERTHOU, polaksta, Saulpierotti, Shebangmed, Stanisław Polak, susobaco, Tapia, Tejas, Timo Zhang, Tkoyama010, Toton95, Vojta Netrh, Vulpeculus, and Cimbali.

If you also want to add or contribute to a translation, check pympress’ page on POEditor . Note that old strings are kept and tagged removed , to give context and keep continuity between translations of successive versions. This means removed strings are unused and do not need translating.

Official releases are made to PyPI and with github releases . The community maintains a number of other packages or recipes to install pympress (see Install section ). Any additions welcome.

Releases 43

Contributors 33.

Python 98.7%

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I had been looking for a decent PDF Viewer! for ubuntu!

For those searching for a decent pdf viewer that can read the pdf from your system & allows you to do simple operations like select-highlight, draw on it, rotate, add text....

Just use the edge browser as the default app to open pdfs.

I searched a lot on if there is a way to use acrobat. The closest is to use the chrome extension which is awesome if you are opening pdfs online, but I could not find a way to open system pdfs (without uploading it to document cloud). The second best is to use the Wine version of Acrobat, but tbh sucks.

The best, close to native experience I got was from Edge browser. My basic requirement was to edit pdfs in place (without uploading it to some random cloud, or explicitly exporting as pdf ). Hope this helps....

The ideal situation would be if Acrobat comes as a native app for Ubuntu, which at this point is just a dream.

Okular as suggested in the comments is pretty great indeed! I hope it stays free. (Having said that, we do need a FOSS PDF Viewer similar to Okular!)

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15 Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers

Nowadays, we are greatly dependent on online platforms for educational, working jobs, business, communication, and other purposes. Right? And the usage of portable documentary format files, better known as PDF files, is increasing day by day. So, all of us need to have the best quality pdf reader. But, all the pdf viewers are not the same. And features are also different from different applications. Which one will be perfect for you? The big question is! Agree? Most of the Linux distributions also come with pdf viewers, but they have some limitations and are not high functioning, unfortunately. That is why we are here to address you with the best Linux PDF viewers.

Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers

If you search online for Linux PDF Reader, you will find a long list. But it is difficult to pick the best one when you don’t know enough about them. For this purpose, I want to help you, and here is a list of some best Linux PDF viewers.

I checked all these 15 Linux PDF viewers and added their major details here in the list. Hope that you will read the brief description to understand which can be your cherry on the cake.

This application comes with a very user-friendly interface, and anyone can use it without any previous experience. It supports almost all file formats and offers many PDF document editing functions.

Important Features

Okular is a completely free multiplatform PDF document viewer.
This Ubuntu PDF reader is a resource and energy-efficient application that has already received the Blue Angel Ecolabel award.
With all common formats, it also supports some unique file formats, including XML Paper, DjVu, TIFU, ePub, XPS, DVI, etc.
Released in 2005, it is getting continuous updates till today.
Okular offers almost all PDF editing functions, including margin, annotation, commenting, adding images, marking, etc.

Okular Official Flathub Snapcraft

2. Acrobat Reader

This application has a very clean interface, and you will love exploring files with it.
This application offers screen readers and screen magnifier functions for visually impaired users.
There are different page layout systems you can use to view the pages.
It lets you zoom the pages and enable the reading modes.
Not just viewing, this app also lets you do basic PDF editing too.

Acrobat Reader Official Snapcraft

This is the perfect Linux PDF viewer for your low-configured or old machine. That’s the reason; it is considered the best lightweight pdf reader. It allows bookmarking of pages and copies and zooming for a clear vision.

Not just simple PDF files, you can also view presentations and other file formats using this Ubuntu PDF reader.
You will feel good navigating, zooming, and scrolling the files because of its clean user interface.
SyncTeX is the best part of this application which lets you view one file on multiple devices.
Besides PDF, this app also supports file formats like DVI, Multi-Page TIFF, Postscript, and DjVu.
It is quite a lightweight app and won’t require more than 80 MB of free space.

Evince Official Flathub Snapcraft

4. Qoppa PDF Studio

But you can try its premium version as well to get more features. Not just for viewing PDF files, PDF Studio allows you to do everything with its extensive PDF editing tools. Do you need any extra features? Maybe not.

This cross-platform supported PDF viewer comes with a soothing user interface.
It gets regular updates and works well without an internet connection.
Advanced functions for text recognition and permanent Redaction are here as well.
Almost all PDF editing tools for Attaching files, text editing, resizing images, regulation of file size, freehand annotations, adding notes, etc., are available here.
PDF Studio lets you create PDF files from MS Word, Text, and even Images.

Qoppa PDF Studio Official

5. Foxit Reader

Nobody expects more features than what Foxit Reader offers, for sure. With its smooth interface, you will definitely love scrolling the files. Having this application means you have a complete package of pdf applications. So, don’t miss it anyway.

This application works offline, and so you can read PDF files anytime, anywhere.
You can print PDF files directly from this app, requiring only a few clicks.
This application is integrated with cloud storage services and popular enterprise CMS.
It indeed lets you protect our important files with passwords.
From this app, you can directly share PDF files with others and collaborate with people.

Foxit Reader Official

Indeed, you can create pdf files, also. This lightweight pdf reader contains many useful features that will be very adjuvant to PDF programs. Besides, its interface will grab your attention from the very first second.

It initially comes with an additional software library with essential command-line tools.
Initially, it’s a very lightweight app that works very fast as well.
Since the time of its release, this app has been getting regular updates.
This useful PDF viewer also supports most file formats, including XPS and e-books, besides PDFs.
To ensure the best PDF viewing experience, this app offers different viewers for different platform users.

MuPDF Official

Besides viewing pdf files, it comes with additional features, including a text extractor, postscript converter, etc. But, you cannot deal with high-graphics files smoothly with this application. On the other hand, it is highly beneficial when you are not so much sensitive about graphics.

XPDF Reader supports multiple languages to view PDF files containing text from different languages.
It lets you easily convert PDF into text, PPM, PGM, PBM, etc., and image files.
You can bookmark your essential PDF files in a folder to get them instantly.
This application is getting regular updates, so you will always feel good using it.
It is initially an open-source and free PDF viewer available for almost all operating systems.

XPDF Official

8. Qpdfview

It comes with the fit and rotates function, full-screen support, text search, keyboard shortcuts, etc. These features make the software easy to function. And also, the interface and theme of this Linux PDF viewer are very satisfying.

Qpdfview is available on almost all Linux distros.
It initially provides the simplest functions for scrolling, browsing, viewing, and downloading PDF files.
You can easily search files by name, date, summary, description, etc.
This application offers both free and premium versions for the users.
It also supports multiple languages and almost all common file types.

Qpdfview Official

Its interface is old and graphical, so it is not a good option for those worried about graphics. But, in other cases, most users don’t have any complaints. So, you can try it if you are looking for a simple one.

It is one of the most popular PostScript and PDF document viewers, available for most Linux distros.
This free PDF viewer is launched from the main GNU server.
It is available in multiple languages and supports various file formats.
Comparatively, it comes with a backdated user interface, but still, the complete application is very simply structured and suitable for new users.
It indeed lets you print PDF files, zooming and scrolling them.

GNU GV Official

10. Zathura

But if you only deal with the light files only, it will work quite smoothly. It has some additional features like search text, syntax support, easy customization, and mouse-free navigation. It also supports other format files such as DjVu and PostScript.

Zathura is a very updated PDF viewer with a modern user interface.
Its mouse-free navigation systems make scrolling and browsing files easier.
Basically, Zathura is not just a PDF viewer, but it’s a complete document viewer that supports different file formats.
The Synchronization TeXnology means the SyncTeX function is available here.
It supports automatic document reloading and lets you bookmark pages and files.

Zathura Official

11. Atril Document Reader

But, it does not allow editing of the pdf files, while the other necessary tasks can be done easily with the application. It is also supported on most of the Linux distros. So, just download and run it on your system if you don’t need to make additional customization so often.

Atril Document reader supports not only PDF files but also PostScript, DVI, XPS, Encapsulated PostScript, DJVU, and so on.
You can directly print files of all those formats from this application.
Essential functions like hypertext navigation, bookmarking, filtering, etc., are available here.
You can directly copy text from the PDF files to the clipboard with this app.
Atril is also available in multiple languages for almost all Linux distros.

Atril Document Reader Official

12. ePDF Viewer

And, you need such type of application when you are using an old computer. Agree? Both PDF and PostScript files support this minimalist PDF viewer. It also allows text search, annotations, bookmarking, and so on. You can easily install it on your device from the Ubuntu software center.

You can either use this app as a simple PDF viewer or use it for editing the files.
A huge community of this Linux PDF Viewers users are there in a group where you can publish your creation in PDF files.
This app offers the simplest interface where you will never get distracted.
You can filter PDF files or use its advanced search engine to find one.
It is initially free of charge, and you can use it directly from its website without downloading the application.

ePDF Viewer Official

13. Calibre

As a powerful e-book reader, it supports almost all common e-book formats.
This app lets you do the basic PDF editing and bookmarking files you may need in the future.
As a free and open-source PDF viewer for linux, it is available for most Linux distros.
It comes with a simple user interface and is good for casual usage only.
Here, you can create an e-book library and share files from the library with your friends and family.

Calibre Official Flathub Snapcraft

14. Google Drive

Though it doesn’t provide many features, it is quite functional. If you don’t have any experience with it, just use it for once and see how beneficiary it is! It’s free up to 15GB, and then you have to purchase if you need more space.

You can synchronize it with your email ID and use multiple devices with one account.
This authentic Google app lets you create unlimited doc files to store text and documents.
Not just PDF files; this app also supports other common formats as well.
From this app, you can directly share files with others and collaborate with people.
You can scroll, print, view, and zoom PDF files with it.

Google Drive Official

15. Master PDF Editor

Master PDF Editor – A Cross-Platform Multi-functional PDF Editor

Master PDF Editor is proprietary software for viewing and editing PDF files, and it deserves a place in the list anyway. This is one of the best Linux PDF editors also, and it lets you edit pdf files easily. Almost all necessary tasks can be done on pdf files by using this wonderful software. However, this app has an amazing user interface, and you will love the way it presents PDF files for the viewers.

Master PDF editor offers a simplistic way to scroll, view, and search PDF files.
You can copy text to the clipboard and bookmark files from this app.
For the best PDF reading experience, you can use reading mode and zoom the pages.
It also comes with support for JavaScript and Dynamic XFA forms.
With almost all necessary PDF editing tools, it lets you add a digital signature on a PDF file.

Master PDF Editor Official Flathub

Final Verdict

If you want the best Linux PDF viewer and reader, you don’t have to leave this list. Whether you are a student or a worker, that is not a fact; everybody can use these tools. I can say if you use these pdf readers, you’ll do all tasks easily, and you can save more time.

However, I can share my preference for the confused people about many options. For my everyday use, I am right now using Okular. But I love Adobe Reader and Master PDF Editor for their unique features. You can try them too.

Well, it’s time I should take my leave. You are always welcome to comment or opinion in the comment section. On the other hand, you can share your experience with other online platforms or social media after using these applications. Thank you for your time.

Foxit no longer supports Linux. Disappointed you either don’t know that or simply don’t care.

Masterpdf Editor is available for ARM64. A feature I have found no where else for pdf editing software.

Adobe Reader hasn’t been updated on Linux since 2013, so stop saying it’s available on Linux. Even if you could get it working (and you can’t without a lot of messing around), it is highly insecure as it hasn’t been updated for 9 years.

Okular 1.10 (OS Ubuntu 18.04) seems unable to display print preview.

Okular fails as it does not allow users to print a selection of pages: ep 1,2,9 It only allows ranges, single pages or the whole document. As such it is useless for printing. The developer has known about this failing for years but rejects all calls to improve it.

@pete That’s just not true. I printed a range from Okular a few minutes ago. If you’re seeing that behavior, it’s something wrong with your printer set up, not Okular.

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Evince Document Viewer

Key features.

Zoom in and out of documents
Presentation mode
It can be used from any application bo preview printing and select printing options (you must use "print to a file" in the application and later open the file with Evince to print it).

Installation

Part of the default Ubuntu installation

Hints and Tips

Other applications you may wish to look at, pdf viewers, pdf creation tools, further reading.

Evince (last edited 2015-06-06 15:49:43 by 197 )

The material on this wiki is available under a free license, see Copyright / License for details You can contribute to this wiki, see Wiki Guide for details

Best PDF Reader for Linux

The Adobe PDF file format is commonly used for instructions, manuals, boarding passes, and lots of other types of documentation. You are bound to run into a PDF document eventually. Is your Linux system able to open and read them? In this tutorial, we have compiled some of our favorite PDF readers for Linux. You will learn about our top picks and what makes them solid choices for installation.

In this tutorial you will learn:

Best PDF readers for Linux, with installation instructions

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions
Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Any
Software	Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Evince, Okular, Atril, Adobe Reader, MuPDF, Zathura, GNU gv
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the command.
Conventions	– requires given to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of command – requires given to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Any web browser

You do not need any special software to open PDF documents. Your web browser can open them just fine. Whether you have Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, or some other web browser, these are all perfectly capable of viewing PDF documents. Keep in mind that web browsers may not have some of the convenient features of dedicated PDF viewers, but they can usually suffice, and will save you from needing to install additional software.

Firefox web browser being used to view a PDF document

Evince PDF Viewer

Evince (also known as Document Viewer) is the default PDF viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. If you are using GNOME, then this application should already be installed on your system – it often comes pre-installed on other desktops, too. We like it because it is a super lightweight program, makes the text easy to read, and it is often installed by default.

Installation instructions:

Atril PDF Viewer

Atril is the default PDF viewer for the MATE desktop environment. Even if you are not using MATE, this is a good choice for a PDF viewer. We like it for its simplicity and convenient features, such as the ability to bookmark documents.

Okular PDF Viewer

Okular is the default PDF viewer on for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. KDE users will already have it available, and you can still install the application regardless of which desktop environment you currently use. We like it for some of its advanced features, such as the ability to highlight the important parts of documents with the text highlighter.

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader might be the first choice people think of when it comes to opening PDF documents. Although there is a Linux version of Adobe Reader available, it no longer receives updates on the Linux platform hence is obsolete and not recommended for the installation. The only good thing we can say about it is that the creators of the PDF format are the same who developed this program.

Adobe Reader is a proprietary PDF viewer available via external 3rd party package. To download it:

MuPDF PDF Viewer

MuPDF is an extremely lightweight PDF viewer for Linux that supports a PDF, XPS, and EPUB formats. Use this software if want a very small install and a PDF viewer with no extra features. We like it because it’s probably the most basic and lightweight PDF viewer available.

Zathura PDF Viewer

Zathura is a free, plugin-based document viewer application. Available plugins include PDF, PostScript and DjVu. Use this software if you would like to extend the functionalities of your PDF viewer.

GNU gv PDF Viewer

GNU gv is a powerful PostScript and PDF document viewer developed by the GNU Project . This one is always a safe choice to make, considering a huge amount of other software on Linux is also developed by GNU. We like it for its retro interface and simple features.

Closing Thoughts

In this tutorial, we saw a list of the best PDF viewers on a Linux system. We also learned how to install any of the applications mentioned here on all major Linux distros . Each of them have their pros and cons, and the best one for you will depend on your situation, whether you want a beefy program, lightweight viewer, or want to stick with one of the default viewers.

10 Best PDF Document Viewers for Linux Systems

This article is the continuation of our ongoing series about Linux Top Tools , In this series, we will introduce you most famous open source tools for Linux systems.

With the increase in the use of portable document format ( PDF ) files on the Internet for online books and other related documents, having a PDF viewer/reader is very important on desktop Linux distributions.

There are several PDF viewers/readers that one can use on Linux and they all offer related basic and advanced features.

3. Foxit Reader

Foxit is a cross-platform, small fast secure PDF reader known for its speed and user-friendly interface. It offers advanced annotation tools, security features, and mobile integration, making it a preferred choice for many professionals and casual users alike.

It is feature-rich with features including:

An intuitive user interface.
Support for scanning documents into PDF.
Allows shared viewing of documents.
Commenting tools.
Add/verify digital signatures and many more.

To install Foxit Reader on Linux systems, you need to download the Foxit archive file, and run it as shown.

4. Firefox (PDF.js)

PDF.js is a general-purpose, web-based PDF viewer built with HTML5, and it’s an open-source, community-driven project backed by Mozilla Labs.

To install PDF.js in Linux systems, follow the below instructions:

and then you can open

5. XpdfReader

XpdfReader is an old and open-source PDF viewer for the X Windows system that is supported on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It additionally includes a text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and many other utilities.

It has an old interface, therefore users who care so much about nice graphics may not enjoy using it so much.

To install XpdfReader PDF reader in Linux, run:

GNU GV is an old PDF and Postscript document viewer that works on an X display by providing a graphical user interface for the Ghostscript interpreter.

It is an improved derivation of Ghostview developed by Timothy O. Theisen, which was originally developed by Johannes Plass. It also has old an graphical user interface.

To install GNU GV PDF reader in Linux, run:

Mupdf is a free, small, lightweight, fast, and complete PDF and XPS viewer. It is highly extensible because of its modular nature.

A handful of its notable features include:

Supports a highly quality anti-aliased graphics renderer.
Supports PDF 1.7 with transparency, encryption, hyperlinks, annotations, searching plus many more.
Reads XPS and OpenXPS documents.
Written modularly to support additional features.
Importantly, it can also handle PDF encoded with Chinese GBK well.

8. Qpdfview

qpdfview is a tabbed document viewer for Linux that uses Poppler for PDF support. It also supports other document formats as well, including PS and DjVu.

Below is a list of its features and components:

Uses Qt toolkit for interfaces.
Uses CUPS for printing purposes.
Supports outline properties, and thumbnail panes.
Supports scale, rotate, and fit functions.
Also supports fullscreen and presentation views.
Enables text search.
Supports configurable toolbars.
Supports configurable keyboard shortcuts and many others.

To install Qpdfview PDF reader in Linux, run:

Zathura is a lightweight, highly customizable PDF reader that offers a minimalistic interface, keyboard-driven navigation, and supports plugins to handle various document formats.

To install Zathura PDF reader in Linux, run:

10. Poppler

Poppler is an open-source PDF viewer primarily used for rendering PDFs. Originating from the Xpdf project, it has become a go-to library for many Linux applications, offering efficient performance, extensive format support, and continuous development by the community.

To install Poppler PDF reader in Linux, run:

Many people these days prefer using PDF files because many online documents and books now come in the form of PDF files. Therefore getting a PDF viewer that meets your needs is vital.

I hope you find this article useful and if we’ve missed any tool in the above list, do share in the comments, and don’t forget to share your additional thoughts, You can leave a comment in the comment section.

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65 Comments

Could you explain how to install MuPDF? The version in Software Manager is from 2017. A more current version, mupdf-1.23.11-source.tar.gz , is downloaded from their site, inzipped, it doesn’t appear to have a “configure” file. The instructions I’m finding on their site are confusing.

A .deb file, like for Master PDF Editor, seems to work much better with the Linux Mint’s built-in GDebi Package Installer.

How come that Foxit Reader is here? The Linux version is not good at all. It freezes constantly when you open something more than a few pages

Thanks for the useful feedback, we shall test this and where necessary update the article accordingly.

THE BEST, I MEAN THE BEST, PDF READER IS LLPP, AND I’VE ALREADY TESTED OUT ALL OF THEM.

There is also Zathura, based on gtk3 and poppler.

@schillingklaus

Thanks for sharing, we will check it out.

Okular is an amazing product and really worked for me.

I’m a religious okular user (use it every day). I just don’t understand why an update has to change the UI so much that my current settings and shortcuts were erased. I have to annotate so many PDF files everyday and having my workflow disrupted like this is just utter bullocks!!

The developer knows best what you need and what will work for you. :P

I’m trying to find a PDF viewer that will view XFA forms. So far, Okular , the Mint Document Viewer , and Adobe Reader 9.15 (the last Linux release from Adobe) all fail to do so.

I’m looking for a PDF viewer for Linux who shows the digital signatures of the documents. Any ideas?

Okular in the latest versions (19.12 for instance)

Thank you! I also found Master PDF :)

How about if I want booklet printing? an alternative for adobe acrobat reader?

Using Ubuntu 16.04.6. Does a pdf save previous versions of it’s self within the pdf? I downloaded and saved a fillable and savable pdf form, it was working. Places – Recent Documents saved in two spots. The Recent Documents list was cleared and now it seems to be gone when I re-access the pdf in the documents folder.

I was searching for a PDF viewer with a small memory print but usable and GV is a real find and surprisingly small if you consider all it does. Thank you!

@ 01101001b

It’s good that you have found something you were looking for. Thanks for the feedback.

Correct me if I am wrong, but Okular does not support 3D embadded graphics. The PDF media extension is currently only supported by Adobe Reader.

It has an embedded 3D model, so it should support for 3D features like 3D embedded graphics.

The screenshots didn’t show one important thing: In Okular , you can have the normal menubar (file, edit, view etc) which makes your life so easy. In evince, there used to be a similar menubar, but no more – just the awful hamburger button with many missing properties. The new evince (3.28) has also another problem: resizing he window doesn’t work at least in kde plasma.

Okay, many thanks for sharing your concerns with us.

I have just tried evince, okular and foxitreader, no doubt, foxitreader is much better for study purposes and easy way to highlight and making notes…

Many thanks for sharing your experience with us.

After a probed many options, found Master pdf editor, a very nice option to read and modify pdfs. They have a free options, for me, it’s a must have. Very complete.

Many thanks for mentioning, we will check it out.

Had been using Master PDF , which is a very polished and complete editor. I only use rarely and for basic marking, and after an update today the free version is forcing a watermark “ Created with Master PDF ” which is not acceptable for the purpose. I’m looking to replace it.

Thanks for sharing this useful info, we will check out the latest version of Master PDF.

Actually, I didn’t even know before that Foxit supports unix distros so far. But I’ve tried out its features when I was on Windows and hands down, it’s a splendid tool to read documents, but not the best one in order to edit them.

Sure, it recognizes text, but doesn’t allow you to replace or delete some, just to draw something over. Thus I prefer to use this thing in order to work with pdf-documents. It’s pretty nice solution for Linux, because it works very fast despite it’s online tool, and they have applications for all the common systems as well

Okay, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

I have found DocHub to be very useful and similar to AdobeReader – a good alternative for people on Linux is. No need to install, and is able to read and sign documents.

Many thanks for sharing this.

FoxIt is no longer supported for Debian systems.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

is there a decent multi threaded PDF reader that can use all CPU cores. I need to search within files a lot. MuPDF doesn’t seem to be well maintained.

Have you tried out all the above, may be doing so can help you find one that fits your needs.

Very helpful list! Thank you for this, it saved my college homework today!

Good to know that this helped you in a college homework; hope you enjoyed it. Thanks a lot for writing back.

I needed a PDF app to sign and complete forms: LibreOffice’s viewer is the best so far (given you have a jpg image of your signature and don’t need a digital signature).

Try to look through this list: http://alternativeto.net/software/fill-and-sign-pdf-forms/?license=free

Add/verify digital signatures and many more is one of the most important features that lack this programs. I tried Foxit and wasn’t able to find the feature in the “free” version.

Usually use Okular but didn’t want to pull in all these Qt4 dependencies so I’m trying out qpdfview. Very nice! Even the ability to add bookmarks and annotation (highlighting and notes). A bit less feature-complete than Okular, but way fewer dependencies, lean, and works great.

Yap, dealing with a lot of dependencies can be so nagging at times, i actually use Okular as well but now i have to give Qpdfview some time and find its strong points comprehensively. Thanks for stopping by and for the wonderful feedback.

I very much enjoy using PDF Studio. PDF Studio is a versatile tool for manipulating and annotating PDFs. This is the perfect replacement to Adobe Acrobat(I use Ubuntu). There is a slight learning curve. However the installation is very simple. I use it to edit my notes as a college student.

We had not come across PDF Studio, many thanks for bringing it to our attention, and for the useful feedback. We shall review it as well.

Could you please add whether the above viewers support fillable forms. Thank you.

@Lurkin4pdf4Linux

Most if not all of the above PDF viewers do not efficiently and reliably support fillable forms, however, Evince comes close with a similar feature but it may not be productive enough for the task.You can use PDFEdit , install it from here: http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/pdfedit .

Try to read through the answers provided here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/29230/is-there-software-that-can-fill-pdf-forms for a better understanding.

does anyone knows PDF editor tool for centos 6 or 7 supported application ???

qpdfviewer default on Manjaro and its work everything with pdf files.

Thanks for the informative update, it’s much appreciated.

qpdfview is the best I’ve come around. FOSS, nice rendering, nice annotations. However for everyday things I stick with eVince.

Many thanks for letting us know of qpdfview, its the first time we have heard of it.

We have added qpdfview to the list, once again, thank you for bringing it to our attention.

OKULAR /Evince / xpdf all based on poppler, and have problem when handing GBK charset, for Chinese people we suggest not use these pdf reader.

Sorry about that, you can also make suggestions of what works well for the Chinese people(that region generally) and we shall include it in the article. Thanks for your getting back to us.

MuPDF can handle pdf encoded with GBK well, for OKULAR /Evince / xpdf ,they are based on poppler, and I submit a bug report on poppler ( https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91013 ) , seems no people answer.

Mupdf can handle pdf encoded with Chinese GBK well .

@sheng yue Ni

Thanks a lot for the useful suggestion, we hope Chinese, and users from other regions will benefit from it. Additionally, we shall review all of the suggestions from the readers.

Mupdf has now been included in the article, thanks once more for mentioning it to us.

Greetings … Is there any software in Linux to convert pdf to odt (or docx)?

@Luiz L. Marins

Try to use pdf2odt:

https://github.com/gutschke/pdf2odt

You can also try this free online conversion:

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/pdf-to-odt/

I saw your suggestion, but I need convert to text. Thank you by your interested.

“… In order to perform the conversion, all input files are first converted to image files and then included as background images for the ODT and ODS Open Document files. The Open Document files can then be edited by writing on top of the image(s)…”

At the moment Foxit is the most reliable PDF viewer (I mean – it will render all documents without any issues and have good support for annotations/comments and highlighting).

Evince has problems with annotations/comments, more advanced PDF’s (not always are rendered as intended) and it’s quite slow for larger documents.

PDF.js works well with smaller docs – it’s quite good to preview downloaded PDF’s in the browser, but is very slow).

Didn’t tried Okular since it has too much dependencies for GTK based environments.

MuPDF is missing in this list – it’s very fast so I use to quick preview documents…

Thanks for sharing, i have checked out MuPDF, will surely add it to the list

Sure will collect all info and update you with that

Could you add any repository details for yum?

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Top 7 PDF Editors for Ubuntu Linux

PDF is an acronym for Portable Document Format. It’s the defacto format that is used for sharing documents electronically and is usually the preferred format when attaching documents on a website for download.

1) LibreOffice PDF editor

This may come as a shock to many as LibreOffice is generally known as a desktop publishing tool for basic used cases such as Word Processing, spreadsheets, and presentation, to mention a few. Thankfully, the free and opensource suite which is used by millions of users around the globe provides you the ability to modify PDF documents using LibreOffice Draw .

Developed and maintained by KDE, Okular is a multi platform document viewer based on Qt and KDE framework libraries. It is therefore native to the KDE environment and distributed as part of the KDE bundle.

To install Okular on Ubuntu 20.04, run:

Written in C++ and based on Qt, Scribus is a free and opensource cross-platform Desktop publishing tool. With Scribus, you can create a wide variety of publications including magazines, newsletters, posters, brochures, and other pieces of artwork.

Scribus is available in the Standard Ubuntu repository and to install it, run the command.

4) Foxit Reader

At a glance, Foxit PDF reader provides the following features:

Once downloaded, extract the Foxit Archive installer with tar command

Next, run the installer as a sudo user as shown

Accept the license agreement and click ‘ Next ’

GIMP , short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a popular cross-platform image editing tool that performs a wide range of image editing operations. It provides high-quality image manipulation tools for performing image modification tasks such as retouching and restoring. In addition, you can design mockup art, UI components such as buttons and icons aided by high-quality color management features which ensure high-color image fidelity. It’s also used in workflows involving other applications such as Inkspace and Scribus as discussed earlier.

To install GIMP, use the snap package manager to install from Snap package as shown.

6) Inkscape

7) master pdf editor.

Master PDF Editor is a proprietary tool, unlike the tools discussed earlier. Thankfully, it provides a free version that allows you to try out the basic PDF editing features. To unlock all the PDF editing features, you need to upgrade to the premium version.

Upgrading to the full master version, you have to part with $79.

On the command line, run the wget command to download the Debian package.

That was a roundup of some of the Top PDF editors that you can leverage to modify or make changes to your PDF documents and even export them to other file formats. Any of these PDF editing tools provide essential PDF editing tools to modify your PDF documents. However, if you are going for more advanced PDF editing features, we strongly recommend the Master PDF editor full version.

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animate package on Linux - which PDF reader?

I am using the animate package to include some animations into my beamer presentation. Currently I run Ubuntu 16.04 and tested Okular (0.24.2), Document Viewer (3.18.2) and Foxit Reader (2.4.4.0911) and none of them were able to display the animation, they would only show the first *.png file. Eventually I was able to display the animated slides using Adobe Reader DC via PlayOnLinux but I really would like to have a native Linux option. Is there any PDF reader for Linux which would be able to display the animations generated with the animate package?

2 Animate is implemented with javascript, which is why it is mostly Adobe reader only. I'm tagging along on this question because I'd like to know as well. – daleif Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 15:53
related Q: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/235139/… – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 15:54
1 Try [pdfpc] pdfpc.github.io . It is very goof for presentations. I don't know if animation is supported. I don't have an example with some aniamtions to try it. – Hafid Boukhoulda Commented Oct 18, 2018 at 17:44
1 @daleif Just to keep you updated: There are new possibilities (see below). – AlexG Commented Dec 21, 2018 at 13:30
@HafidBoukhoulda, pdfpc doesn't support animations unfortunately... – matthieu Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 16:53

2 Answers 2

As of version 2018/11/19 , package animate 's usability isn't any longer limited to platforms on which Acrobat Reader is available. animate was extended to also support the dvisvgm output driver/utility by M. Gieseking which is part of all major TeX distributions.

Now, it is possible to produce animated SVG output that can be viewed as standalone file or as embedded object in a Web page.

All popular Web browsers on all popular platforms including Linux and even on mobile platforns are able to display animated SVG. Note, however, that mileage may vary between browsers. Browsers that are based on the Blink rendering engine, such as Chrome, its open-source base Chromium and Opera show an extremely good performance here (much better than Acrobat Reader!). Firefox, on the other hand, is somewhat disappointing.

So, if you don't mind doing away with PDF and using SVG instead, at least for presentation documents, have a look at this related thread: Using the animate package without Adobe . There, a beamer class based presentation with embedded animations is presented. It may also serve as a benchmark for browser performance.

Okular now supports PDF animations, since: https://invent.kde.org/graphics/okular/-/merge_requests/10

(animateinline package, with ocg or widgets method and autoplay)

It also plays well media9 movies embedded in the PDF. (In presentation mode)

Check the "snap" instead of "apt" version if you are using Ubuntu.

Or even better, via flatpak:

There are still a couple of bugs with some animations, see bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452094 bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434964 bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452093 – ferdymercury Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 10:41
Could you please add a minimal example that demonstrates bug 434964 in Okular? Btw, the default "icon" method works for me in Okular. – AlexG Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 11:11
The PDF linked in bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434964 was made in 2016 with animate version 2016/03/15 . In the meantime, the implementation of the "icon" method (which is animate 's default) has changed such that it is supported by Okular. I think this kde bug can be closed. – AlexG Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 12:56
The point is that some PDF files are from published files (earlier than 2016) that one can not just change, you don't even have the source code of these, just the PDF. They play well in Adobe Reader, so it would be still nice if Okular supported these older PDF files. – ferdymercury Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 21:14
it now does not work in 2023 on ubuntu 20.10 – The Imp Commented Apr 12, 2023 at 6:23

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$ubuntu pdf presentation viewer$

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[ubuntu] PDF viewer for viewing Embedded movies in presentation.

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PDF viewer for viewing Embedded movies in presentation.

After shifting to Ubuntu, I have started making my presentations using the latex beamer package. A totally great package to use, despite the relatively steep learning curve. However, the only problem I am facing is to display embedded movies in my presentation.I can create the content just fine, but the problem is that I cannot play it on any pdf viewer in Ubuntu . I am trying to play the movie in the pdf which can be downloaded from here . 1)Adobe Reader does not play embedded movies, because it requires realplayer to play them. 2) I have tried evince. Evince opens a separate window to play the movies in the normal mode (this is okay, acceptable to me), but in the presentation mode, this does not work. I searched the web a bit, and found that this was a bug in evince which has been corrected in the latest version. I am using the latest stable version, which is 3.2, but this still happens in my system. So Evince does not work either. 3) I have tried okular. But it just brings up an yellow textbox when I click on the movie. Does anyone have a solution, which will allow me to play an embedded movie in a presentation in a pdf viewer? I am not too concerned about the format. I can embed whichever format works. (The only other thing that apparently used to work is Acrobat Reader 7. This is what this old post in the ubuntuforum says. However, I could not find the Acrobat 7 installation files for linux on the web, so could not test this solution too)vvv

Last edited by souravc83; March 18th, 2012 at 09:37 PM .

Re: PDF viewer for viewing Embedded movies in presentation.

This may help - http://vimalkumar.in/2010/05/23/embe...r-and-movie15/ Rodney

Thanks Rodney. What I am stuck at is the ability to play the video in any pdf reader in Ubuntu. The blog also mentions you cannot test it (i.e play the video in the pdf file) on linux. I am curious if there is a workaround that allows you to play the video in Ubuntu, using either Acrobat, evince or okular (ar any other pdf reader).

I haven't tried this yet but it appears promising. http://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/PDFmovie.html

Hi Chronon, I went through that. This is fine. But my problem is not with creating the multimedia content, it is with playing it in any pdf reader in Ubuntu. The above author uses a mac system for his content. Maybe I should have posed the initial question more clearly. I can create the pdf content just fine, but I am having problems playing the content on an Ubuntu system.

Hello! I wonder if you have found some solutions for this, because I came across this problem as well... I am trying to use the 'media9' package for embedding video files, but I cannot really play them neither under Evince, nor Okular, nor Adobe Reader. (Foxit doesn't even start for me...) Furthermore, it seems, that from the 9.4.1 release for Linux, Adobe disabled the support for playing flash videos. So I am curious, if since your post, did you find any solution? Some workaround method, other PDF viewer? (PS.: The videos work fine under Window 7, Adobe Reader 9.5.1)

Hello! I managed to read a video embedded within a pdf file with okular. The pdf was created with latex beamer and the video was .flv format. I do not know if other format will be readable as well. The only default is that the still picture that was in my presentation (i.e. the picture you click on to start the video) shows up as a black rectangle. This is a minor problem, because what I really want is the video.

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How should I present a slideshow consisting of PDFs?

I need to present a slideshow on a projector. I know that if I use openoffice it can send a seperate image to the laptop screen and the projector.

If I have some other application (like a PDF viewer) being used to view the slideshow, how can I make the presentation display on both the screen and the projector?

3 Answers 3

PDF presenter consoles

A presenter console is a tool that allows you to see an overview of your slides on one monitor while holding the presentation on another. Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice come with such a plugin for odt files.

For pdf files there are a number of solutions. I have found pdfpc to be the most polished presenter console. It has a number of comfort functions, e.g. you can:

freeze the presentation for your viewers while browsing through your slides
display an overview of all of your slides
turn off the presentation screen
set up a timer and be alerted when your presentation time is up

If you look through the website you will also find key configurations for common presentation remotes and other nifty ways of customizing the application.

Here are some screenshots:

The proprietary NVidia driver for Ubuntu provides a Twinview mode you can access through the NVidia driver GUI program. This allows you to present the same desktop on both your screen and the projector.

What if I don't have an Nvidia card? – Dan Commented Dec 4, 2011 at 8:47
The proprietary ATI graphics driver provides the "Catalyst Control Center" application for managing graphics. Try looking for a Twinview equivalent there if you have ATI. – Barbarrosa Commented Dec 10, 2011 at 19:15
What about intel? – Dan Commented Dec 10, 2011 at 23:11
1 You might be able to use just Intel. Take a look at help.ubuntu.com/community/… . – Barbarrosa Commented Dec 10, 2011 at 23:51

Check system settings (gear icon on top right) and select "Monitors". There you can configure each one resolution, duplicate screen and select which one will display HUD.

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Tabbed PDF viewer that works on Ubuntu

I used to use the Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu, which supported tabbed PDF viewing. Since I usually have a bunch open but am reading only one or two, tabbed viewing is better than Evince's open-each-PDF-in-a-new-window behavior.

Unfortunately, it's slow and I'm anyway having issues installing it on Ubuntu.

What other PDF viewers out there work on Ubuntu and support tabs?

3 How about using Chrome or Firefox as a PDF viewer? Is there something that you'd need that they can't give you? – dotVezz Commented Feb 4, 2014 at 20:41
What window manager are you using? Some window managers can provide the tabbing. In a way, that's its job — applications shouldn't be messing about with tabs as they're imposing their choice of not being able to display two documents side to side. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 1:14

3 Answers 3

qpdfview ( sudo apt-get install qpdfview ) is the best alternative as lightweight tabbed PDF viewer.

Editing : not available. Same for annotating. If you need these, you need another alternative.

Viewing options : all usual viewing options are there, including zooming, fitting to page, continuous and non-continuous scrolling, full-screen and rotating pages.

Usability : it's not beautiful, but works fine. Almost everything is under single-level menus instead of long toolbars. There's keyboard shortcuts for every menu item, so no need to click with mouse for regularly used things (for example, switching between tabs and rotating pages on broken PDFs)

Compatibility : I haven't encountered PDF file that wasn't rendered properly by qpdfview. This includes relatively complex scientific articles and PDFs with graphics. qpdfview also supports postscript and DjVU with plugins (installed by default).

Bugs : the only bug I have encountered is that search does not find scandinavian characters (äöå) properly. It worked well with ASCII charset (plain English).

6 So, I've been using this for the past few days, and it's awesome! Very fast, and the tabs work like a charm. Thanks! – Manishearth Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 9:54

I have a rather different case to present here with no PDF reader recommendation, because it would make any PDF reader a tabbed reader.

If you happen to have KDE 4.1x installed in your Linux box then you can do the following:

Open a PDF in your choice of PDF reader.

Follow the images to implement the needed settings:

Default look of Okular PDF reader

Right-click on Title bar → More Actions → Special Application Settings...

Select OK in dialog box

Check Autogroup with identical

Click on Do Not Affect and choose Force

Now open any number of PDFs in that PDF reader and they will be tabbed like:

As Steve noted in the comments, be wary of memory usage if your computer runs short on RAM because each tab of a program here is equivalent to an individual separate session of the program.

2 While this is very handy for screen real estate the downside is that each tab is a separate copy of the whole reader program - this may consume a lot more memory than the same documents opened in a tabbed reader so if you are short of RAM avoid this solution. – Steve Barnes Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 7:53
@SteveBarnes Thanks for the info, I didn't think of that. But in that case, a lightweight PDF reader could be utilized yet retaining the said tabbed functionality. – Firelord Commented Jul 16, 2015 at 11:27
Is there any way of doing this on ubuntu? – safetyduck Commented Jun 19, 2020 at 9:52
1 @mathtick you would need to have KDE installed and running. I don't know whether other Desktop Environments (such as Gnome 3) offer this functionality. – Firelord Commented Jun 19, 2020 at 11:21

Use Firefox, you don't need a separate program to do that.

Right Click on a PDF-file.
Choose Properties .
Go to the Open With tab.
Choose firefox .

1 You should at least add how to associate PDF files with FireFox. That is not obvious. – user416 Commented Dec 13, 2016 at 11:29

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COMMENTS

GitHub
Pympress is a simple yet powerful PDF reader designed for dual-screen presentations - Cimbali/pympress
Is there a specialized Pdf viewer for Latex-Beamer presentations on
Presentation and notes can be provided as two separate pdf files or as a single file with the LaTeX beamer option "show notes on second screen". It supports multimedia content, animations (by showing slides in rapid succession), slide transitions, special treatment of overlays and prerendering of slides to cache.
What PDF viewers are available for Ubuntu?
Every second e-mail I get suggests to download Adobe Acrobat reader, but adobe.com doesn't provide a Linux version. Which PDF Viewer are there available for Ubuntu? I'm fine with partial solutions...
I had been looking for a decent PDF Viewer! for ubuntu!
If you are looking for a PDF viewer to show presentation slides, have a look at pdfpc. In particular, it has a mode where the entire window is filled with the PDF page, i.e. no control buttons are visible, which is exactly what you want when recording a presentation or sharing it in a video conference, without having to go full screen.
15 Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers
Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers If you search online for Linux PDF Reader, you will find a long list. But it is difficult to pick the best one when you don't know enough about them. For this purpose, I want to help you, and here is a list of some best Linux PDF viewers.
Evince Document Viewer
Evince Document Viewer. Evince is the default document viewer for PDF (Portable Document Format) and Post Script files but can also display other formats, such as images. It is designed to make reading documents a simple and hassle-free experience, and has intuitive previewing, indexing and searching capabilities.
PDF viewer list on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux
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PDF viewer list on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Linux
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Best PDF Reader for Linux
Zathura is a free, plugin-based document viewer application. Available plugins include PDF, PostScript and DjVu. Use this software if you would like to extend the functionalities of your PDF viewer. Zathura PDF Viewer. Installation instructions: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian: $ sudo apt install zathura.
pdf-presenter-console : Focal (20.04) : Ubuntu
PPC is a viewer for PDF which uses Keynote-like multi-monitor output to provide meta information to the speaker. It can show a normal presentation window on one screen and a more sophisticated overview on the other, with information like a picture of the next slide and a clock with the time remaining.
Ubuntu Manpage: pdfpc
DESCRIPTION. pdfpc is a GTK-based presentation viewer which uses Keynote-like multi-monitor output to. provide meta information to the speaker during the presentation. It is able to show a. normal presentation window on one screen while showing a more sophisticated overview on.
PDF viewer combined with video player
I need to give a PDF presentation but I want to include some videos in between some of the slides. Is there a PDF viewer which will allow me to play videos in between slides for a presentation? ...
10 Best PDF Document Viewers for Linux Systems
In this article, we shall look at 10 important PDF viewers/readers that can help you when dealing with PDF documents and files in Linux systems.
How can I highlight or annotate PDFs?
Evince (or Document Viewer), the default pdf viewer as of Ubuntu 18.04 also supports highlighting and annotations. To show the annotations menu bar, you must click on the red circle (see below).
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In this article, we will discuss top 7 pdf editors for Ubuntu Linux. We will cover the installation and basic features of pdf editors for Ubuntu desktop.
beamer
15 I am using the animate package to include some animations into my beamer presentation. Currently I run Ubuntu 16.04 and tested Okular (0.24.2), Document Viewer (3.18.2) and Foxit Reader (2.4.4.0911) and none of them were able to display the animation, they would only show the first *.png file.
Looking for pdf presentation viewer for dual monitors
Looking for pdf presentation viewer for dual monitors Hello, I'm looking for a presentation viewer. For several people I produce pdf presentations using pdfLaTeX, the beamer package and a lot of homemade LaTeX (graphics) stuff.
Ubuntu Manpage: mupdf
DESCRIPTION MuPDF is a document viewer that can show PDF, XPS, EPUB, XHTML, CBZ, and various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF.
Is there any command-line image/PDF/PPT (powerpoint) viewer that
2 To my knowledge, there is no truly CLI interface to view PDFs, Pictures, or PPT presentations, those all require graphical interfaces to display transitions and pictures.
PDF viewer for viewing Embedded movies in presentation.
After shifting to Ubuntu, I have started making my presentations using the latex beamer package. A totally great package to use, despite the relatively steep learning curve. However, the only problem I am facing is to display embedded movies in my presentation.I can create the content just fine, but the problem is that I cannot play it on any pdf viewer in Ubuntu.
How should I present a slideshow consisting of PDFs?
If I have some other application (like a PDF viewer) being used to view the slideshow, how can I make the presentation display on both the screen and the projector?
linux
I used to use the Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu, which supported tabbed PDF viewing. Since I usually have a bunch open but am reading only one or two, tabbed viewing is better than Evince's open-each-PDF-in-a-new-window behavior. Unfortunately, it's slow and I'm anyway having issues installing it on Ubuntu.

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15 Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers

Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers

2. Acrobat Reader

4. Qoppa PDF Studio

5. Foxit Reader

8. Qpdfview

10. Zathura

11. Atril Document Reader

12. ePDF Viewer

13. Calibre

14. Google Drive

15. Master PDF Editor

Final Verdict

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Closing Thoughts

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Top 7 PDF Editors for Ubuntu Linux

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4) Foxit Reader

6) Inkscape

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