Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux helpSpecial Offers
Feature
A survey of Linux PDF viewers
Share
Print
CommentsPDF's progenitor PostScript is a page description language that was invented in 1982, also by Adobe. It is an interpreted language with postfix (RPN) notation and is thus very flexible. In contrast, PDF is a file format describing the position and nature of text and pictorial content (in raster or vector format), which makes it easier to parse and process. To learn more about the relationship of PostScript and PDF, see Adobe's explanation.
Adobe Reader
Adobe's own Adobe Reader was the first program written to display PDF files. It's a sibling to Adobe Acrobat, a commercial program that handles the creation and modification of PDF files.
Available since version 3 for Linux, Adobe Reader is the viewer that supports the format best. For example, it is the only Linux program that handles form fields (although you cannot save their content). Version 6 of the software did not feature a Linux port, inciting some disgruntled Linux users to scoff at the "Portable" portion of "PDF." In version 7, Adobe resumed development of the Linux port and changed the GUI toolkit for Adobe Reader from Motif to Gtk+ 2. Since version 6, Adobe Reader has also supported JavaScript, thus diminishing the gap with PostScript.
The installation file of 7.0.8, the current version, is a whopping 47MB, and it requires you to have the Gtk+ 2 libraries on your system (which need another 20MB). Adobe Reader's plugin architecture enables you to have special add-ons from Adobe and third parties, and it offers features out of the box that most or all other readers do not have, including support for digital signatures and a function that reads the textual content to you.
Adobe Reader is your only choice if you want to view PDFs in a Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, or Opera browser window, since it comes with a Netscape 4-compatible plugin. But it is the heaviest among the programs featured in this comparison, and the lack of speed with which the browser plugin starts the application can impair your Web browsing experience. However, once started, Adobe Reader renders pages quickly. It doesn't cache page thumbnails, though, so when a thumbnail is occluded by other windows and then exposed again, it needs to be regenerated. Note that Adobe Reader's features might also be detrimental to your security.
Xpdf
The Xpdf package was the first third-party alternative to Adobe Reader for Linux systems. It appeared about three years after Reader. Xpdf's interface might be described as spartan, and it still relies on the Motif toolkit to render its appearance. It renders pages exceptionally fast, and allows you to zoom, rotate, and search documents. Printing an arbitrary range of pages is also supported, albeit only by piping PostScript to a program or file. Since it is designed to be lightweight, Xpdf is a good tool to use to quickly skim through a PDF file, or read through a file with only a few pages. Xpdf is the only viewer among this group that does not support page thumbnails, but it will display a textual outline if the document has one.
Xpdf's code was taken as the basis for the rendering engines of Evince, ePDFView, and KPDF, as we shall discuss in a moment. Since it wasn't written with code reuse in mind, the integration of the rendering engine into other programs was done by simply copying code. The maintenance problems resulting from this finally led to the separation and relocation of Xpdf's rendering engine into the Poppler library.
Evince
Evince is a GNOME program designed to provide a consistent interface for interaction with multiple document formats. It currently supports PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, and DVI.
If you took Xpdf, made it use the GNOME libraries for its interface, removed the buttons to navigate in 10-page increments, and added better print support, you'd have Evince. As a side effect, probably due to the usage of Gtk+, Evince takes a lot longer than Xpdf to render pages.
If you like the PDF part of Evince, but do not wish to install the GNOME libraries, ePDFView might be for you. However, in Evince, the pages of a document with some formulas and simple vector graphics in it display almost instantly, whereas ePDFView can take as long as a few seconds per page to process them.
KPDF
The PDF viewer of the KDE project, KPDF, is the strongest competitor of Adobe Reader. It starts up faster, renders at least equally fast, and supports most of the features of Adobe Reader. It employs thumbnail caching, so rendering is only done once.
KPDF can be used as a standalone application, but it also runs as a Konqueror plugin. When viewing documents with the plugin, the Konqueror and KPDF interface elements are merged, as opposed to the Adobe Reader plugin in other browsers, where interface elements are duplicated, missing, or inoperative.
KPDF's text-to-speech engine and user-defined color adaptation enhance accessibility, and the "filter as you type" thumbnail search makes selecting relevant pages quick and easy. If your hands need rest and you don't want to listen to a computer voice, you may also use automatic scrolling mode to read your document. Since KPDF is a KDE application, it uses the excellent printing interface of the KDE desktop.
The KDE project has plans for providing a consistent interface to the popular document formats, called okular, but, unlike GNOME's similar Evince, it isn't ready for production use yet.
Recommendations
If you have a choice, I recommend using a combination of Xpdf and KPDF to view PDF files. I'd rather copy and paste a URL leading to a PDF document into Konqueror and use the KPDF browser plugin than wait for the Acrobat Reader plugin to stuff its megabytes into my memory. Of course, you can also just instruct your browser to open PDF files with your favorite viewer, thus removing the dependency on plugins. Okular looks promising for people who don't like the "keep it plain" philosophy of the GNOME project that shows in Evince. Also, check out DjVu if your content is mainly in raster format (this is especially true for scanned documents and photographs).
Leslie P. Polzer is a free software consultant, software developer, graphics designer, and writer. He gets most of his work done in terminal windows managed by a tiling window manager.
Comments
on A survey of Linux PDF viewersNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
When I first installed OpenSUSE 10.1 with the "non-free, non-open" applications, in installed Adobe Acrobat as the default PDF viewer from the Firefox web browser. The first time I clicked a PDF link, I thought my computer had frozen. It literally takes nearly a minute of solid hard drive activity to load the bloated thing. Just to read a PDF. This on a 2GHz AMD with 512MB of RAM, not the fastest but certainly no slouch.
Go to the Adobe website and try to download Acrobat Reader. 41MB! Just to read PDFs! Yes, it has lots of features in there that are "cool" however, in the last several years I can think of only one PDF I have needed to read that used any features such that it required the "real" reader.
Nope. I do not and will not use Adobe Acrobat unless I have to. And, since 90% or more of the PDF files out there work fine with the leaner and less complicated alternatives, I don't feel any pain from avoiding the bloated thing!
<a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/" title="adobe.com">http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/</a adobe.com>
I don't use the Acrobat "suite" at all so you and others would have to comment on its virtues and vices.
Too bad. I'd use something else if it were practical.
P.S. actually kpdf is writing in capital letters but there's a stupid message telling me 'please don't use so many caps. using caps is like yelling! (sic)'
I want a reader that is very very fast, and can open PDF files in an instant without eat up all my CPU resources and my RAM.
I want quick, fast, slim, small, light-weight, free.
On the win32 side, I'd recommend "Foxit PDF Reader". Nice and fast with the basic functions you need. None of the Adobe Reader bloat and Portable Foxit runs clean off a USB.
Understandably, my needs are less than many others as PDF for me is simply a way to print news to files for later reading from Flashdrive or PalmOS.
Under win32 (I don't get to pick what I use at work; yet they allow Flashdrives so far) I need a pdf reader that'll run from a single directory (portableApps is my new win32 OS) and Adobe bloat isn't going to cut it. When I'm able to replace Foxit with a more open portable reader; the'll be no indecision.
I also like what the folks at portableApps are doing and that they are using FOSS where possible. My home machines get a basic OS install while my user apps and data move from usb port to usb prot depending on where I feel like working.
As a side effect, probably due to the usage of Gtk+, Evince takes a lot longer than Xpdf to render pages.
Rendering is done by poppler library, if it's slow it's maybe because your version uses cairo backend of poppler which is still not accelerated (you can also use the splash backend which is xpdf rendering code). Anyway, Gtk is not related to rendering PDF at all.
BTW, for those just joining us, the switch is '--disable-cairo-output' when compiling poppler.
I'm not sure, but I gather that if cairo is built with the glitz backend it'll get opengl acceleration via the xrender extension or some such. And there are a few other accelerated backends. But, yeah, if you don't have those and are unwittingly using cairo when you don't have to, it makes a huge difference.
Why pay for what it free? Its like paying good money for water or for air at a gas station.... senseless.
This is patialy wrong gpdf is another one that can be used through the mozilla-bonobo plugin.
Also this article seems to be very unresearched. It lacks to mention gpdf, epdf(still experimental but it works, based on the E Fundation libraries)(there is also EPDF - eiffel based pdf creation library), svp(doesn't seem to be active but svgalib based), gspdf(gnustep app). And I'm guessing a lot more.
Note I don't have an account on linux.com nor do I plan on having one and that's the only reason I'm posting as anonymous... I can be reached at:
ruskie
mages.ath.cx
Put the two toghter to get my email<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:) Don't forget the @...
I got some of this info from my own experience and some by running a quick freshmeat seach for pdf viewer...
Erik Postma.
timothy
The whole point of using something other than Adobe's program is to get something that is free. Cabaret is not free software. You can't get the source code at all.
But, what is actually needed and glaringly absent is a PDF creator/editor. Now I know that several people will take issue with this statement and offer up OpenOffice, a few twats will even have the gall to suggest some bizarre ps2pdf tool chain, and of course some other wanker will suggest Gentoo as the solution but, the fact is that there is no good way and certainly no free way to edit PDFs on Linux.
Think about it. You've got a PDF and you need to enter some additional information or change a date in it. How? You've got a scanner that scans pages to PDF but it's one PDF per page, how can you stitch them all together EASILY? You want to create a PDF with form fields in it...
As always, the community is incapable/unwilling to develop a good solution and Adobe leaves Linux sucking hind tit. Linux PDF support and capabilities are at the level that they were for Windows back in 1999! Adobe just released Acrobat 8 for Windows meanwhile, you're looking for a basic reader that can render Acrobat 4/5 PDFs correctly.
There is an EMACS mode for editing PDFs.. *giggle*
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 28, 2006 11:07 PMNobody yet had the time or interest to start such a project. There is also no dict/free or GNU/free PDF editor for Windows yet. Get over it. And just bye Acrobat.
Re:There is an EMACS mode for editing PDFs.. *gigg
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 29, 2006 12:41 AMMy complaint is that we have "The Community" working on Xpdf, Evince, KPDF, ePDFView, Ghostscript and many more CRAPPY readers. We also have OpenOffice et al who have produced PDF writer libraries so OOo Writer can export PDFs but, Writer can't read or edit a PDF!
It seems that none in the community are looking at the bigger picture of reader/writer. None of them are working together. None of them are leveraging the great code sharing capabilities that the open source community chants on about. They're all just muddling along churning out crap and proclaiming defiance and independence from Adobe. Give me a break!
For Windows there may not be any open source PDF editors but there are countless gratis and shareware PDF editors and there is of course Adobe Acrobat itself.
Since I have a need I would buy Acrobat but, as I said, Adobe offers only hind tit to the Linux community. There is no Acrobat for Linux that anyone can buy!
Re:There is an EMACS mode for editing PDFs.. *gigg
Posted by: Administrator on November 29, 2006 04:12 AMAs far as editing graphics in a pdf format, there already is a free solution that goes pretty far: the IPE editor together with pdftoipe utility. It does very good job converting graphics from a pdf file to the ipe xml format, which you can edit with Ipe and save to pdf again. It does horrible job with text, though.
Problem with pdf format is that it is a sort of universal format, which makes it hard to edit.
Also, Acrobat is not just an editor. It handles things like permissions (which, IMHO, are completely messed up in pdf), digital signatures, etc.
I think that the main reasons there are no free pdf editors are that very few people have the need (there are plenty of programs producing pdfs that do much better job, and whose output would not be editable by such an editor in a satisfactory way anyway), and those who do feel the need cannot agree on what should such editor actually do.
I would be perfectly happy if there was a free way to add comments and "editor marks" to an existing pdf file. Currently, Adobe reader can do it, but only if the document is created by Acrobat professional edition and digitally signed, which IMHO is ridiculous. If you create the pdf document in another way, AFAIK there is no way to do it, regardless of your platform.
How do you edit a PDF? How do you add data? How do you create fillable forms? How do you join multiple PDFs into one?
Hell, OpenOffice can't even display the PDFs it creates!!!! How braindead stupid is that?!?!?!?
OpenOffice can't even display the PDFs it creates!!!! How braindead stupid is that?!?!?!?
That point is irrelevant: OOo isn't a PDF editor or viewer.
I agree, though that a good PDF editor would be a great addition to Linux. But until someone is willing to develop a FOSS version of Acrobat (not exactly an easy task), or Adobe decides to make a Linux version of Acrobat, then your only option is to run Acrobat under CrossOver Office. Even then, it's kind of iffy.
Can be done relatively easily in Scribus, and not so easily, but with more control, using pdftex.
How do you join multiple PDFs into one?
There are several command line tools that do that available, just search on Freshmeat.
There are a lot of ways to edit PDFs in Linux
Posted by: Administrator on November 29, 2006 07:34 AM- <a href="http://www.ecademix.com/JohannesHofmann" title="ecademix.com">flpsed</a ecademix.com>
- <a href="http://pdfedit.petricek.net/" title="petricek.net">PDF Edit</a petricek.net>
- <a href="http://www.koffice.org/kword/" title="koffice.org">KWord</a koffice.org>
- <a href="http://www.scribus.net/" title="scribus.net">Scribus</a scribus.net>
- <a href="http://www.inkscape.org/" title="inkscape.org">Inkscape</a inkscape.org>
- <a href="http://www.gimp.org/" title="gimp.org">GIMP</a gimp.org>
- <a href="http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/" title="pdfhacks.com">pdftk</a pdfhacks.com>
Re:There are a lot of ways to edit PDFs in Linux
Posted by: Administrator on November 29, 2006 07:36 AMRe:There are a lot of ways to edit PDFs in Linux
Posted by: Administrator on December 18, 2006 05:39 AMIt might work well to convert the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.pdf forms to something else, fill them out, print them fax them whatever, and then even export them back to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.pdf for viewing.
Is there a linux program that facilitates the creation of text boxes and calculated fields (like acrobat professional does)?
Is converting to postscript the way to go?
Any help would be appreciated.
I try to install Adobe Reader in Ubuntu but it never able to start up (breezy , dapper and also edgy)
so I forced to dual boot to Windows to view that document
hope that the developers can do something to improve on this
It turned out I needed Acrobat Reader because the document was locked (encrypted). and only the printing was enabled.
And on top of all it was produced on Linux... no success for me to print it from Linux<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-(
Acrobat Reader is not yet 86-64...
KPDF is quicker, but XPDF renders better for me
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 29, 2006 12:31 PMI, for one, am glad that we have more than one Free Software PDF viewer, and I will continue to use both KPDF and XPDF. If I find that a better one (must be FOSS) for my needs comes out, then I'll give it a fair shot, too.
<a href="http://www.planetpdf.com/" title="planetpdf.com">http://www.planetpdf.com/</a planetpdf.com>
Just search under find pdf software and select linux.
Yes they are commercial, I agree - not everybody needs it but still - they work on Linux.
Besides - why not be thankful for what the community already gave us for free.
I love Linux as a platform. Maybe we should think about it that it is a present - it is free to most of us - the users - don't you think so?
First, PDF is not slowly anything. It is the well-established, widely-used, and de facto document format for millions of users across the printing, publishing, advertising, engineering, insurance, government, and many other industries. The University of California spends hundreds of millions of dollars for PDF rights every year.
Second, the problem is NOT viewing PDFs. The problem is managing PDF libraries and using the rights management features provided by Adobe. Therefore, Linux developers should stop blankly staring at Acrobat Reader and start understanding who Acrobat (full version) has become a global standard.
Third, as an example application for PDF, take a look at PDF Explorer:
<a href="http://homepage.oniduo.pt/pdfe/products.html" title="oniduo.pt">http://homepage.oniduo.pt/pdfe/products.html</a oniduo.pt>
The lack of complete PDF solutions in Linux stop Linux from being considered across academia and in many industries.
Re:There is an EMACS mode for editing PDFs.. *gigg
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 01, 2006 12:34 AMTry KWord. It has some of the difficulties you talk about, and it won't save directly as a<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.pdf, but if you have a print driver that saves a<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.pdf instead of sending to the printer, you can save it as a<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.pdf. I don't guarantee that it'll look exactly like the original, but it does OK, at least for simple documents.
>handles form fields
That's not right. Cabaret is also able to display, print *and save* PDF-forms:
<a href="http://www.cabaret-solutions.com/en/" title="cabaret-solutions.com">http://www.cabaret-solutions.com/en/</a cabaret-solutions.com>
Adobe Acrobat.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 28, 2006 09:30 PM#