PDF Viewers That Are Open Source

Evince PDF

Windows, FreeBSD, Linux

Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats. The goal of evince is to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.

Evince currently supports PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex with gedit, comics books (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt), and many more.

Review: Evince opens PDF files into a well laid out reader. The DRM flag is ignored making Evince far more useful than Sumatra PDF or Adobe reader. Loading speed was similar to Sumatra. One notable glitch occurs when text is selected, the text becomes distorted. This can somewhat hinder text selection. It has been reported that the Windows version will only open PDF files. In our test on Microsoft Windows we confirmed Evince was unable to open .epub an eBook format.

The fact that Evince PDF is not handicapped by DRM restrictions makes it far more useful as a PDF reader when compared to Sumatra PDF. For this reason Evince is our choice for a Windows PDF reader.

An annoying flaw in Evidence costs it half a star. On some PDF documents when print is selected, the printer outputs only blank paper. Certain PDF files will not print correctly using Evince. This is a reoccurring problem. Ultimately this is a serious issue with Evidence and results in the software being inadequate.

PDFlite

PDFlite can be used to read any PDF file. Simple design. View PDF documents with all common features such as search, print, zoom. Use the PDFlite printer so you can convert any document to PDF file.

PUP alert: Malware in installer. Even if you uncheck the toolbar and other software it still installs PUP in the background! Avoid unless you want to take the time to install it yourself from the sourcecode they provide.

Sumatra PDF

Microsoft Windows Only

A minimalistic PDF reader. Sumatra PDF has a minimalistic design, and its simplicity is attained at the expense of many other features. As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space - it has a 1mb setup file (compared to Adobe Reader's 27.5mb setup file), and it starts up rapidly. It was designed for portable use in the sense that it's just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive[1]. This would classify it as a portable application.

One interesting feature of Sumatra PDF is that it remembers exactly the last opened page for each pdf file. This helps it be a very useful pdf e-book reader.

Review: Sumatra PDF contains anti-features. It enforces DRM restrictions. As stated on a Sourceforge review, "it supports DRM of "protected" PDF files, and the author stubbornly refuses to make it optional. So you can't print PDFs for offline reading, and you can't copy text to the clipboard for pasting into Google translate, saving to your notes, quoting in a paper, etc."

The Sumatra PDF software developers are crybabies. Read their little rant about PDFLite is a SumatraPDF ripoff. The title should be Sumatra PDF developers do not understand Open Source.

GhostScript

Windows, FreeBSD, Linux

Command Line. Ghostscript is a suite of software. You can view, convert, and manipulate PDF files. Ghostscript is an interpreter for PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Postscript can be picky and inconsistent about the PDF files it will open.

Example: view a PDF on Windows XP

gswin32c.exe -dSAFER -dBATCH "C:\Program Files\GPLGS\test3.pdf"

The example will open the pdf document in a GUI window for viewing.