A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

[Posted January 24, 2005 by corbet]

This article is part of the LWN Grumpy Editor series.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to free PDF viewers tried to assess the current state of the art in free applications which deal with PDF files. Since the publication of that article in December, a new player has shown up. Evince is a GPL-licensed GNOME viewer for a number of document formats, including PDF, PostScript, and DVI files. When evince 0.1.1 was announced, your editor decided that it was time to have a look.

Evince is built as a viewer with the ability to add backends for any file format of interest. For PDF files, the supplied backend is based on the xpdf code. The PostScript backend uses ghostscript, and the DVI backend uses a built-in DVI library. Building evince requires the GNOME 2.9 libraries, but is otherwise painless; it dropped right into place on your editor's Fedora Rawhide system.

This application is looking good - especially for a 0.1.1 release. The rendering of PDF files is fast, and the quality is good. The zoom options are rational, and it is easy to move around within the document. Printing of PDF files works (that's one of the new features in 0.1.1). Evince can display page thumbnails in a side bar; for documents with a table of contents, that, too, can be displayed and used for navigation. Text can be selected with the mouse and pasted into other applications.

Evince offers a search capability which appears to have potential, but which needs a bit of work yet. Hitting "^F" will open a firefox-style "find" bar at the bottom of the screen (search does not appear to be available from the menus). Typing a string will highlight occurrences of that string in the text; see the screenshot for an example. There are "previous" and "next" buttons, but the only thing they do is cause "find previous" or "find next" to be printed; it's nice to know that evince is listening, but that still is probably not quite what the user had in mind. If the string does not appear on the current page, evince will note the next page where the string can be found - but the user must get to that page independently.

There are a few other glitches yet. Selecting text with the mouse can be a little unreliable; sometimes what gets pasted is not exactly the text which was selected. There are no thumbnails for PostScript documents. The buttons for paging through the document are labeled "Up" and "Down," which are not the most obvious terms. There is no way to print only part of a document. There is no man page - or other help of any sort.

All of the above notwithstanding, evince is a tool which is, even at this early point, competitive with the other free PDF viewers. It is entirely useful now. If development continues at the current pace, evince may well become your editor's viewer of choice in the near future.

(Log in to post comments)

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 24, 2005 22:55 UTC (Mon) by lamikr (guest, #2289) [Link] (4 responses)

Mandrake Cooker backported the KDEs upcoming 3.4 version of KPDF
viewer and that is something really good. They have replaced
the buggy pdf backend to something which really works.
In addition it has search, text selection, image selection etc.
functionality.

I am using gnome desktop but for PDF viewing kpdf 3.4 is something
I highly recommend.

Mika

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 25, 2005 0:14 UTC (Tue) by jayavarman (guest, #19600) [Link] (3 responses)

Yep, seconded.

Kpdf is the best free PDF viewer *at this point*. I'm eager to see Evince's progress, this search-as-you-type feature is great, but then I want continuous page rendering like kpdf is doing right now. Now, what I really dislike in the xpdf backend is the font rendering, it's really low quality, some popular fonts aren't even recognisable on certain sizes. A project which should IMHO go under the freedesktop umbrella is a PDF renderer library and then KDE and GNOME would just do their frontends.

An interesting development this of kpdf and evince, why didn't it start 1 or 2 years ago? And why both almost simultanously? Anyway it's good to see that, finaly, free desktops are getting on par with proprietary PDF readers.

Rui

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 25, 2005 0:17 UTC (Tue) by jayavarman (guest, #19600) [Link]

Actually it seems that one of cairo's goals is near what I described.

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 25, 2005 3:02 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link] (1 responses)

> And why both almost simultanously?

Just keep that thought for the next time someone suggests everyone work
on one desktop for efficiency's sake.

This type of gentle competition happens all the time. The KPDF guys
contributed back to xpdf, and I imagine the Evince people did the same.
So I as a KDE user benefits, and the Gnome user benefits. We both will
end up with excellent applications. And be able to choose between either
desktop without having to sacrifice necessary functionality.

I can't imagine a better software scenario.

Derek

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 26, 2005 10:48 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Beyond that, I understand that GNOME and KDE developers actually look at each others' work with a view to improving their own desktops; this isn't copying or cheating, it's competition in Free Software at work.

I have no doubt that if GNOME introduces a killer feature, KDE will implement something similar; if KDE introduces a killer feature, it would be very unexpected if GNOME didn't acquire the same concept implemented differently. The presence of two desktops doesn't mean two desktops moving slower than they would if there was only one desktop, it means two sets of R&D effort being put into the Linux desktop, and both desktops improving faster.

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 25, 2005 2:03 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

A question for the Grumpy Editor:
How does this PDF viewer fair with the problematic PDF files you mentioned (Concluding Notes at http://lwn.net/Articles/113094/ ) that only seem to render with the Adobe Acrobat Reader?

-Brock

Apt-get

Posted Jan 25, 2005 16:21 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

I can't apt-get it, it must not really exist.

Apt-get

Posted Jan 25, 2005 17:15 UTC (Tue) by lmartelli (subscriber, #11755) [Link] (2 responses)

It's in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu

Posted Jan 26, 2005 6:04 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, I couldn't apt-get that, either. Are you sure it exists?

Ubuntu

Posted Jan 28, 2005 13:23 UTC (Fri) by syndicate (guest, #27535) [Link]

You have to be using hoary.

Apt-get

Posted Jan 31, 2005 13:26 UTC (Mon) by jordi (guest, #14325) [Link]

It's uploaded, but pending ftp-master review before inclussion in the unstable dist.

A Grumpy Editor's addendum: evince

Posted Jan 27, 2005 2:46 UTC (Thu) by lordsutch (guest, #53) [Link]

It built rather nicely on my Debian unstable/experimental box. The only annoyance (besides the poorly-named "Up" and "Down" buttons) is a similar failing to that of gpdf: you can't page through the document using the space bar, and you can't change pages with the cursor keys. Nor is subpixel rendering supported (a common failing of all the *pdf family that I've seen).

On the other hand, the thumbnails are nice and it seems a bit more polished than gpdf.

Adobe acrorbat reader 7 beta for linux

Posted Feb 7, 2005 0:29 UTC (Mon) by oshogg (guest, #23126) [Link]

I think allmost all the complaints by Grumpy Editor are resolved by Adobe acrobat reader 7 beta. I am running it right now and it is the best pdf viewer application ever. It supports sub-pixel anti-aliasing (CoolType), rotation of pages, a very good full screen mode, thumbnails. It uses gtk interface so fits very nicely with other applications.

Osho