Last Updated on April 8, 2020
Software Information and Versions
Here’s a table summarizing the available software.
| PDF Viewers | Version in Repository | Current release |
|---|---|---|
| qpdfview | 0.4.17.99 | 0.4.18 |
| Evince | 3.30.2 | 3.35.1 |
| okular | 1.3.2 | 1.8 |
| Zathura | 0.4.3 | 0.4.3 |
| apvlv | 0.1.5 | 0.1.5 |
| Atril | 1.20.3 | 1.22.3 |
| ePDFView | 0.1.8 | 0.1.8 |
| gv | 3.7.4 | 3.7.4 |
| katarakt | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| MuPDF | 1.14 | 1.16.1 |
| pdfcube | 0.0.5 | 0.0.5 |
| PDF Presenter Console | 4.3.2 | 4.3.4 |
| pqiv | 2.11 | 2.11 |
| ViewPDF | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| xpdf | 3.04 | 4.0.2 |
qpdfview
I’ve given my thoughts of this viewer on page 1.
Evince
Besides viewing PDFs, Evince supports a wide range of formats including PostScript, DJVU, TIFF, DVI, XPS, SyncTeX support, Comic books (cbr, cbz, cb7, and cbt), and others. It offers integrated search, page thumbnails, document indexes, printing, and encrypted document viewing.
okular
okular is another universal document viewer, this time developed by KDE. Like Evince, it supports a lot of documents besides PDF. At the time of writing, the Raspbian repositories’ version of okular misses out on about 12 months development.
Zathura
Zathura is a highly customizable and functional document viewer based on the girara user interface library and several document libraries. It offers vi-styled keybindings, with a minimalistic and space saving interface and easy usage that focuses on keyboard interaction.
apvlv
If you’re a keen Vim user, you might initially be interested in this PDF viewer. But it hasn’t seen a new release since January 2015.
Atril
Atril is the document viewer of the MATE Desktop Environment. Besides PDF files, it can display and print PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript, DJVU, DVI, and XPS formats. The software is a fork of Evince.
ePDFView
This is a simple no-frills PDF viewer that’s not under active development with its last release back in April 2017. One to avoid particularly as it’s by far the slowest to navigate PDFs. The only saving grace is its reasonably modern interface.
gv
This is another fairly vanilla PDF and PostScript document viewer. It hasn’t seen a new release since 2013. Again another program that’s best forgotten.
katarakt
This is a basic PDF viewer offering 3 layouts: a single layout which only support scrolling on a per page basis. There’s also a grid layout which offers continuous (smooth, per pixel) scrolling. Finally, there’s a presenter layout, where you view a single page at a time, scaled to fit the screen. That’s designed for people giving a presentation.
Unusually, CPU-intensive operations like rendering and searching are performed in parallel, making better use of the RPI4’s quad core CPU.
There’s no official website, but there’s a GitHub repository.
MuPDF
MuPDF is a document viewer that can show PDF, XPS, EPUB, XHTML, CBZ, and various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF although there are a few other programs offering an even wider range of formats. MuPDF can open encrypted PDF files. It’s the fastest viewer out of the group to load PDFs, with very useful keybindings such as jumping to a specific page (say 78) with the keypresses 78g.
pdfcube
PDF Cube is an OpenGL API-based 3D PDF viewer that adds a compiz/Keynote-like spinning cube transition effect to your PDF presentations. You can also zoom on 5 predefined areas of any presentation page with a smooth zooming effect. This program is not intended as a generic PDF viewer but as a specific presentation tool. This software isn’t under active development.
PDF Presenter Console
pdfpc is a GTK-based presentation viewer which uses Keynote-like multi-monitor output to provide meta information to the speaker during the presentation. There’s also video playback support. It’s under active development.
pqiv
pqiv (powerful quick image viewer) offers a minimalist user interface. There’s support for animations, slideshows, transparency, VIM-like key bindings, automated loading of new images as they appear, external image filters, image preloading, and much more.
ViewPDF
This PDF viewer is built for GNUstep. It’s badly in need of some love and attention.
This software doesn’t have an official homepage.
xpdf
Sadly, Raspbian provides a legacy version of this PDF viewer. The current release (not included in Raspbian) provides Qt support.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – qpdfview
Page 2 – Charts: Features, Navigation, Memory Usage
Page 3 – Software Information
Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.
| Raspberry Pi 4 Blog | |
|---|---|
| Week 36 | Manage your personal collections on the RPI4 |
| Week 35 | Survey of terminal emulators |
| Week 34 | Search the desktop with the latest version of Recoll |
| Week 33 | Personal Information Managers on the RPI4 |
| Week 32 | Keep a diary with the RPI4 |
| Week 31 | Process complex mathematical functions, plot 2D and 3D graphs with calculators |
| Week 30 | Internet radio on this tiny computer. A detailed survey of open source software |
| Week 29 | Professionally manage your photo collection with digiKam |
| Week 28 | Typeset beautifully with LyX |
| Week 27 | Software that teaches young people how to learn basic computing skills and beyond |
| Week 26 | Firefox revisited - Raspbian now offers a real alternative to Chromium |
| Week 25 | Turn the Raspberry Pi 4 into a low power writing machine |
| Week 24 | Keep the kids learning and having fun |
| Week 23 | Lots of choices to view images |
| Week 22 | Listening to podcasts on the RPI4 |
| Week 21 | File management on the RPI4 |
| Week 20 | Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) on the RPI4 |
| Week 19 | Keep up-to-date with these news aggregators |
| Week 18 | Web Browsers Again: Firefox |
| Week 17 | Retro gaming on the RPI4 |
| Week 16 | Screen capturing with the RPI4 |
| Week 15 | Emulate the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari ST on the RPI4 |
| Week 14 | Choose the right model of the RPI4 for your desktop needs |
| Week 13 | Using the RPI4 as a screencaster |
| Week 12 | Have fun reading comics on the RPI4 with YACReader, MComix, and more |
| Week 11 | Turn the RPI4 into a complete home theater |
| Week 10 | Watching locally stored video with VLC, OMXPlayer, and others |
| Week 9 | PDF viewing on the RPI4 |
| Week 8 | Access the RPI4 remotely running GUI apps |
| Week 7 | e-book tools are put under the microscope |
| Week 6 | The office suite is the archetypal business software. LibreOffice is tested |
| Week 5 | Managing your email box with the RPI4 |
| Week 4 | Web surfing on the RPI4 looking at Chromium, Vivaldi, Firefox, and Midori |
| Week 3 | Video streaming with Chromium & omxplayerGUI as well as streamlink |
| Week 2 | A survey of open source music players on the RPI4 including Tauon Music Box |
| Week 1 | An introduction to the world of the RPI4 looking at musikcube and PiPackages |
This blog is written on the RPI4.
Another piece of software that I find very useful, esp. when scanning to pdf, is PDF-Shuffler. It allows you to sort, delete, move, add etc. by the page. With one document open in one window, and another in a second one, you can drag and drop single pages from one to the other.
PDF-Shuffler is not available in the Raspbian repositories. But a fork called PDF Arranger is available there. The fork was started because the host project has seen little recent development. I’ll take a look at PDF Arranger if there’s any interest from the community.
I use PDF Arranger daily, mostly cropping music pdf to fit on my tablet properly, and to combine, delete or re-arrange pages. It’s good, stable and fast.