Ten PDF Readers

The Portable Document Format (PDF) [1], published by Adobe in 1993, quickly became the standard for exchanging electronic documents. Today, you can choose from a large selection of viewers for the Linux desktop.

In this article, I discuss 10 user-friendly and flexible PDF readers. In addition to standard functions, such as full-text search and bookmarks, the test team looked at the tools for marking and commenting. We also checked whether the readers can fill out forms and display file attachments. Table 1 summarizes the results.

Atril

Atril emerged from the Evince PDF viewer in 2011 and displays PDF, PostScript (PS), and EPUB files. Evince was the standard reader under Gnome 2.x at that time. Atril [2] is part of the Mate desktop [3] but is also available as a standalone application. The program usually appears in the Applications | Office menu. The interface is divided into three parts: In addition to the menu at the top and the toolbar at the bottom, a thumbnail previews the pages of the opened document on the left and the display area on the right.

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