2w ago

Faster alternative to Evince for PDFs

I've been using evince to open PDFs. But for larger PDFs it is quite laggy, for selecting the text and stuff like that. Is this just a limitation of my computer, or are there faster alternatives to evince?

13 comments

Okular perhaps
- Okular is the best I've found

you should try papers. it's a new app that'll replace evince as the default document viewer for gnome in a future version. it's still in development but i've been using it for a long time and it's really good.
- Do you feel like it improves on evince in any way? I saw it a while back but it didn't look too different imo
  
  i'm no expert but even though it looks like evince as far as i know is a completely different app build from the ground up

Try Zathura! I've been loving it.
- I should add that Zathura comes with a minimal graphical interface and you sort of need to learn the vi-like keyboard controls (or look them up with man zathura). But boy is it fast!

I used to use the famous Zathura for a long time, but it's really minimal. Sioyek is an incredible pdf reader so overlooked.
Amongst a lot of other things, it lets you:
quickly preview or jump to figures/references/equations/tables… (even if the PDF does not have links)
search paper names in any search engine you like (defaults are google scholar and library genesis) by middle clicking on their name or using keybindings
mark locations (using lower case for local mark and upper case for global mark) or create bookmarks for quick navigation
highlight text
save annotations in a local database or embed them in a new version of the PDF file to share them with others
automatically reload a file when it changes
I wrote a brief overview of it quite some time ago.

to open PDFs
mupdf
for selecting the text and stuff
This is what is slowing things down.

I feel like this is just a thing with PDF viewers that don't paginate their views properly. Try LibreOffice or Xournal as a test to see if they perform better. I never have a problem.

13 comments