Okular saved me huge amount of time because it allows to select a column in a PDF file and copy it to clipboard. All the other PDF viewers I tried would only select text sequentially line by line.

Try mupdf [1], it allows the selection of any rectangular shape. Use the "right" mouse button to select an area, the text contents of which are copied to the primary selection on pressing Enter from where they can be pasted using the "middle" mouse button.

apt install mupdf on Debian, your distribution may vary.

[1] https://mupdf.com/

Okular does that already, except easier than MuPDF and with the option to copy as an image as well (and more).

Edit: I tried installing MuPDF, and it doesn't hold a candle to Okular, which is far easier to use in practically every way, and which is far more capable. MuPDF is fast at rendering pages, but is extremely limited (e.g. it can't even scroll or display pages side by side).

Zathura can use mupdf as a backend. You get the same rendering speed but an interface that doesn't suck and it works for epubs and pdfs.

I just tried Zathura but found it did not support EPUB where mupdf has no problems with that format:

$ zathura Books/nonfiction/English/Douglas_Murray/Douglas_Murray-The_War_on_the_West-2022-HarperCollins-English.epub

error: Could not determine file type.

This is the version currently on Debian/Sid, with all packages installed (zathura, zathura-ps, zathura-djvu, zathura-cb). I also noticed zathura renders PDF differently (and noticeably slower) compared to mupdf. It does not use mupdf as a backend, instead depending on libpoppler:

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4), libgirara-gtk3-3 (>= 0.2.7), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.16.0), libpoppler-glib8 (>= 0.18.0), zathura-abi-4

Which version of Zathura do you have installed?

[edit]

Checking around I noticed that Zathura can use mupdf as a backend but this is not enabled in the build currently on Debian/Sid. It is available in e.g. Arch [1] but Debian does not package this part. I'll build it myself and give it a try.

[1] https://archlinux.org/packages/?name=zathura-pdf-mupdf

I use both MuPDF and Okular, which is much better than using only one of them.

MuPDF is very noticeably faster than Okular, so I use MuPDF for most cases when I just want to read quickly a PDF file or search through it. Therefore MuPDF is the default application for opening a PDF file, because it opens the file instantaneously, saving me a lot of time when I browse through many PDF files.

Whenever I find a PDF file with which MuPDF has difficulties or I need a feature available only in Okular, I use Okular.

Okular also pulls in a sizeable part of KDE as dependencies:

Depends: kinit, kio, libc6 (>= 2.33), libfreetype6 (>= 2.2.1), libjpeg62-turbo (>= 1.3.1), libkf5activities5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5archive5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5bookmarks5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5codecs5 (>= 4.96.0), libkf5completion5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5configcore5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5configgui5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5configwidgets5 (>= 5.83.0), libkf5coreaddons5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5crash5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5i18n5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5itemviews5 (>= 4.96.0), libkf5jobwidgets5 (>= 4.96.0), libkf5kexiv2-15.0.0 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5kiocore5 (>= 5.69.0), libkf5kiowidgets5 (>= 5.69.0), libkf5parts5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5pty5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5purpose-bin, libkf5purpose5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5service-bin, libkf5service5 (>= 4.96.0), libkf5textwidgets5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5wallet-bin, libkf5wallet5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5widgetsaddons5 (>= 5.77.0), libkf5windowsystem5 (>= 5.68.0~), libkf5xmlgui5 (>= 5.80.0), libokular5core9 (= 4:21.12.3-2), libphonon4qt5-4 (>= 4:4.8.0), libpoppler-qt5-1 (>= 21.11.0), libqmobipocket2 (>= 4:17.08~), libqt5core5a (>= 5.15.1), libqt5dbus5 (>= 5.14.1), libqt5gui5 (>= 5.14.1) | libqt5gui5-gles (>= 5.14.1), libqt5printsupport5 (>= 5.13.0~), libqt5texttospeech5 (>= 5.12.0~), libqt5widgets5 (>= 5.15.1), libqt5xml5 (>= 5.13.0~), libspectre1 (>= 0.2.3), libstdc++6 (>= 11), phonon4qt5, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4)

Compare this to mupdf:

Depends: freeglut3 (>= 2.8.1), libc6 (>= 2.33), libfreetype6 (>= 2.6), libgl1, libgumbo1 (>= 0.9.2), libharfbuzz0b (>= 0.9.11), libjbig2dec0 (>= 0.19), libjpeg62-turbo (>= 1.3.1), libmujs1 (>= 1.0.7), libopenjp2-7 (>= 2.0.0), libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0), libx11-6, libxext6, zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.0)

If you're already using KDE Okular is a natural choice. If you're not there are better alternatives, e.g. Atril for Mate-users, Evince for Gnome users and, yes, mupdf for those who do not use any "desktop environment". Those who use older hardware (like me) appreciate the nimbleness of tools like mupdf. It also fits in perfectly when using a tiling window manager (Xmonad etc) as it does not have any UI elements getting in the way, only showing what you're actually interested in. It supports (according to the man page) PDF, XPS, EPUB, XHTML, CBZ, and various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF.

This is akin to vi vs VS-Code, to each his own I'd say.

This is how I finally gave in to using FlatPak. I wanted Okular, but also wanted the rest of the QT stuff it's own little sandbox as I wasn't using it anywhere else.

I did the AppImage thing for a while, but it was too difficult to keep up to date without the developers prodiving that themselves.

Side Note: Flatpak is actually pretty nice, the lengthas I went to avoid it were pretty unreasonable in retrospect.

I want the opposite - the Unix way: just one copy and one (latest release) version of every library my apps use, one theme for all the apps using the same toolkit rather than every app bundling their own version/instance.

Same here, I have yet to find a containerised application platform which fits my ideas of how to build a system. A sensible package manager with a reliable dependency graph - or plain old apt with judicious use of deborphan - goes a long way in allowing the installation of applications with a number of dependencies, testing it and removing all traces of it afterwards. Containers have their use but Flatpak and Appimage have not hit the right spot for me, at least not yet.

> Use the "right" mouse button to select an area

There is no wrong mouse button.

There is only Spain but no Spleasure

Tell me, Mr. Stavros, what good is a right button when you're unable to find any buttons? (think "The Matrix" here)

I don't use mice (the cat tends to eat them) but touchpads (which he only tends to sit on) without any buttons. For me the "right" button means two fingers, hence "right".

I know, I just found the quotes funny, as 'the right button' means to me 'the button on the right' and 'the "right" button' means "the button that is not wrong, so to speak".

I love okukar and use it regardless of desktop environment.

Okular is my daily driver, I configured minimal vim keybindings and easy shortcuts for review tools which really enhanced my productivity. The configuration is also easily portable. Over the years, I build my own conventions for highlighting and reviewing.

Shameless plug: If you use okular to tead research paper and textbooks you may be interested in sioyek which is an open source PDF viewer specifically designed for that.

https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek

I was intrigued enough by your description to try this out. The video demo is great and very convincing. But using the app is a pain because of horrible defaults. First, the scroll area is much bigger than the document I'm looking at. I found myself fighting to re-center it. Second, the horizontal scroll directions are inverted. Scrolling left pans right. Scrolling right pans left. The app has myriad options, so perhaps these issues are easily fixed. But it's not a great first impression.

You are right. These issues have beenn fixed in recent commits but the release builds are from an older commit.

This looks interesting.

I use logseq's integrated pdf reader for these scenarios - while it can be sluggish at times, it is helpful to be able to read, outline, highlight & crosslink things in the same application.

This is a nice app, and the best pdf viewer i could find for windows. that said, the scrolling behavior sucks on both windows and a debian build i tried it on.

> the best pdf viewer i could find for windows

I haven’t used Windows for at least half a decade, but I remember using Sumatra PDF, and thought that was the best pdf viewer for windows.

It's free, extremely light -weight and feature rich. And reads a lot formats- epub, mobi, cbr, you name it.

You should definitely try Sumatra PDF.

I use Sumatra frequently, and while it's great at what it does, there's a lot it doesn't do. It's strictly a viewer only, so it doesn't even have rudimentary annotations like highlights or underlines. As an epub/mobi reader it's even more lacking. It won't allow you to search for or copy words, despite being able to do so with pdfs. Also, there are some azw3 that are effectively mobi, but Sumatra won't load them unless you rename them with the mobi extension.

>It's strictly a viewer only, so it doesn't even have rudimentary annotations like highlights or underlines

SumatraPDF supports basic annotations as of version 3.3 https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Editing-annotations

Only for PDFs, not for the text based document formats. But yes, you're 100% correct!

Can't be agree more I use Sumatra every day

I moved from Sumatra to okular because the latter has more features and is not perceptibly slower.

Not multi-platform, unfortunately.

What is wrong with the scrolling behavior? It seems fine to me. I just tried it on Arch: scrolling with Page Down and during Find is instant and works exactly like I would expect. I like that you can configure the Page Up/Down overlap for scrolling as well.

Sorry, I should have specified touchpad scrolling. (two finger drag)

Works excellently well from my experience, even on a 144Hz display

The machines I’ve tried it on were a Dell Latitude with a Windows Precision touchpad and a friend’s Dell XPS 13 running debian.

In fact in the second case, I recommended the app, and my friend rejected because he felt the touchpad scrolling was off.

I find myself either going old-school with xpdf (which continues to have some very sane defaults, if an aged UI), and Zathura, which is a similarly multi-format reader, but highly optimised for keyboard navigation.

https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/

The world of readers seems to be stuck in a rather uncomfortable local optimum, with applications which strive to be only readers (e.g., Adobe Acropat, xpdf), some of those single-format, some multi, and those which are either in themselves or within a larger ecosystem part of a document / library management system. None seems to have emerged as either dominant or satisfactory.

I'm including e-book reader hardware and software in this classification. Arguably "web browsers" as well, which seem to be hell-bent on becoming surveillance / application-delivery / commerce platforms, rather than being document-oriented.

Nice. Seems to be missing text overwrite in the annotations. Where you want to type new text to replace existing text and the old text gets a strikethrough. I use this a lot when reviewing documents.

I use this on KDE, on FreeBSD.

I don't have very high requirements for PDF viewers. It does the job just fine anyway :)

If any Mac users are hunting for a binary, you can find one here: https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Okular_Release_macos/

It certainly seems, though, that Macs are an afterthought for this project: the binary is unsigned, the last successful build is over six months old, and the UI isn't anti-aliased on Retina.

> It certainly seems, though, that Macs are an afterthought for this project

The primary target for this is KDE Plasma, so yes, they probably are.

That's certainly the project's prerogative, I didn't mean to come across as entitled. I think I had hoped that "universal" in this context referred to both content, and client environment. :) (And in true FOSS fashion, there's certainly nothing stopping me from contributing and improving it.)

Preview is pretty great on macOS.

macos Preview.app is a good bar. If Okular helps Crop screenshots, Rename image files from the thumbnail side panel or title bar of the same screen I’m viewing them, and Easy “Create Copy” from an image I’ve already changed, I’ll be happier than I am with Image Viewer plus Krita plus shell plus file manager on Ubuntu.

Yeah, never had any real issues with preview. It does the job.

I use Okular because I can customize the pdf colors, so if I want a dark mode I can pick low contrast colors instead of just inverting.

You can also customize Zathura using ~/.config/zathura/zathurarc with the following (for instance):

``` set default-bg "#2E3440"

## Start in dark mode by default set recolor true

## Nord colors for dark more set recolor-darkcolor "#D8DEE9" set recolor-lightcolor "#2E3440" ```

This is cool. Thanks.

Interesting, they suggest using the Microsoft Store to install it on Windows.

Ironic that it's failing while attempting to acquire a license....

It worked for me. Actually I was really happy to see it on the store. One less application to update manually.

I try to get as many applications from there as possible. Firefox is there. Blender even has both the latest greatest and the LTS available.

If you're on Windows, you can just install Okular via chocolatey.

or winget

I guess the real question is: Why, if you ever want anything more than reading from a pdf, you have to hunt down a list of tools (acroread, evince, okular) and hope to find one that does what you want (select a column, fill out fields in a normal font, copy text with newlines intact)…

...also if you want to see 3D inside a PDF. At this point, only arcoread does that and it's Linux version has been discontinued years ago:(

Do you often find yourself needing 3D in pdfs? I know it's there but have never encountered it in the wild. Is it a certain field or specialty that uses this feature?

3D software can export into PDF not only parametric models but also a tree defining the dependency structure, which is awesome and cross platform... except it isn't really due to lack of implementation in PDF viewers.

I have been using emacs pdf-tools lately and really enjoying it https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools

Has anyone made it to work on Windows?

Just yesterday I tried it with msys64, but after pdf-tools-install works just fine, opening a PDF file just gives me "unable to write to temporary file".

I've installed it via the windows store and it's working fine.

I'm asking about pdf-tools on Emacs, not Okular.

Personally I prefer the minimalist UI of Evince.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince

As a Gnome user, I've been using Evince for a long time. Yesterday, tried to open a 30mb 20-page file, and it crawled. The pages would get rendered very slow and rerender on scroll.

I typed "fast linux pdf viewer" into a search engine and quickly landed at Okular, which has a setting to prerender everything and keep it in memory. It flies!

I have tried most PDF viewers available on Linux.

MuPDF is by far the fastest, much faster than Okular or Evince, both at rendering pages and at navigation through the document (also the keyboard-shortcut-based user interface of MuPDF is much faster than the more typical GUI of the other PDF readers).

MuPDF has various limitations and sometimes I find certain PDF files that it cannot render, so it cannot be used as the only PDF viewer.

Nevertheless, using MuPDF to handle the common cases of quickly opening, searching and reading PDF files, together with a fall-back more complete PDF reader, e.g. Okular, seems the best option on Linux.

Wow. It was in my repositories, has no silly interface buttons, and has a very short and useful man page. And indeed it's fast. I'm sold!

Now, I'd like to see double (facing) pages. And it seems MuPDF can't do that. So I'm stuck with Okular, which is sad, as it's the only reason for me to have QT installed...

Same here, but I find that Gnome is a tire fire of usability (post gnome 2) and technical (e.g., fractional scaling) mistakes.

For whatever reason, Evince didn't work right for me on the first try under KDE, so I switched to okular, and never looked back. KDE was preloaded on my laptop, and it's tolerable.

I used to use gnome stuff under minimalist window managers, but that's getting harder and harder on laptops, due to strange hardware integrations with desktop environments.

Sometimes I think the year of the linux desktop was 2003. High dpi displays just worked. So did networking stuff and suspend resume.

Anyway, I'll end my rant by pouring one out (each) for xpdf and evince.

I'm using Okular and I just configured Okular to hide most panels and only leave the scroll bar on the window so I think it's minimalist as well. I will use Ctrl+M to toggle the menu bar when I need other functionalities.

I use its inline text annotation feature to fill out PDF forms that don't have form data. It basically involves using a keyboard shortcut, drawing a box area with the mouse, typing the text and then another keyboard shortcut to actually render it.

You can reposition the box or resize it if text gets truncated or some of the original PDF is obscured.

I use SumatraPDF on Ubuntu/Pop OS, via Wine 7.0.

It is impressively fast. It's pretty much rendered the default PDF viewer on my Ubuntu obsolete, because SumatraPDF is minimalist and perfect on its key features: browsing PDFs fast, selecting text and finding text.

Recently won an award for being power & resource-efficient by German group Blue Angel. Not from Germany, so not familiar with the award, and how much weight it holds.

Had no idea it was also for Windows, I might have to start recommending it to friends/family instead of Sumatra.

I use this everyday for school. It has its annoyances, but overall is great and very lightweight.

I switched from FoxIt to Okular and have been very happy with the improvement in performance.

See also my posting a few days ago: Okular becomes the first eco-certified computer program

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31185495

And yet, there's still no reasonable PDF editor on Linux.

I'm not sure what you mean by "reasonable"...but i have been known to use LibreOffice Draw to make some minor edits to a PDF file. Have you tried LibreOffice Draw for such tasks?

There are some commercial software that you can run via wine.

so far, the best open source alternative (it's not perfect) is Inkscape with the new multi-page feature. You can import/export multi-page PDF documents.

This strategy may fail insofar as you may acquire in the course of installing Okular some of the second third order deps which by default in most systems won't be removed even if you remove Okular itself. You would then conclude erroneously that you had to install fewer extra things because you already have it.

It's a better bet to use your package manager for effectively a graph of dependencies ideally limited to a finite depth for brevity.

Looks like okular <- purpose <- kaccounts stuff also

okular <- kio <- half the kde universe

Regarding purpose

This framework offers the possibility to create integrate services and actions on any application without having to implement them specifically. Purpose will offer them mechanisms to list the different alternatives to execute given the requested action type and will facilitate components so that all the plugins can receive all the information they need.

Sounds sort of like android intents?

The situation remains that basically the first KDE app if you have nothing KDE/QT is 2GB the second and subsequent are 10MB. Honestly with storage costing almost nothing per GB and very limited developer resources this isn't a terrible design. Spending something you don't have in order to save people are resource none of them are going to care about doesn't seem like a great investment.

> This strategy may fail insofar as you may acquire in the course of installing Okular some of the second third order deps which by default in most systems won't be removed even if you remove Okular itself. You would then conclude erroneously that you had to install fewer extra things because you already have it.

This makes sense. Completely forgot about this part. What an idiot I am.

> The situation remains that basically the first KDE app if you have nothing KDE/QT is 2GB the second and subsequent are 10MB. Honestly with storage costing almost nothing per GB and very limited developer resources this isn't a terrible design. Spending something you don't have in order to save people are resource none of them are going to care about doesn't seem like a great investment.

It does makes sense. In a way. But this isn't about space though. To me being in a rolling distro, it just adds weights for package breakage. Especially since GNOME and KDE changes a lot of stuff more often. Not to mention, with all the OSS activism going on and security issues, it is always better to have the least possible dependencies. Whatever is unnecessary for the default package could be optional dependencies always. Prevention is better than cure. Right? :)

Nice. I just gave this a try on my Windows work PC. Seems much lighter and more responsive than Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I use Okular for all my readings on my daily driver Linux laptop- research papers, textbooks, novels- everything.

Can it restore state after system restart on Ubuntu?

Yes, definitely.

Okular just works. Really quickly. It does the job and gets out of the way.

Side note: if you want to crop the margins of a pdf to read it fine on your e-reader (i.e. so margins are not taking up screen space), check out:

Krop - https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.arminstraub.krop

That seems a rather clunky solution. Most good comic readers have a built-in option to automatically crop the whitespace or blackspace out from around the panels while reading.

Four seconds is definitely not normal, it's instant here

I use this on Linux to read documents. It's great.

Okular works nicely for .cbz files (zip files of images.) Oddly, it won't open the same files named with a .zip extension. Not a terrible inconvenience, just a little odd.

My favorite okular feature is the way click-and-drag to pan wraps around between the top and the bottom of the screen. Excellent UX.

> Okular works nicely for .cbz files (zip files of images.) Oddly, it won't open the same files named with a .zip extension. Not a terrible inconvenience, just a little odd.

This can be made to work if you tell mime that zip is an alias for cbz: put

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <mime-info xmlns='http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info'>
    
      <mime-type type="application/zip">
        <alias type="application/x-cbz"/>
      </mime-type>
    
    </mime-info>

in ~/.local/share/mime/packages/some-name.xml then run "update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime"

I've had this for 2 years and 2 days and haven't noticed any issues.