Arch Linux

calvinthomas

Member

Registered: 2007-06-24

Posts: 15

A PDF/Book Viewer

Hi didn't really know where to post this so I thought here was most appropriate, I have a problem. I am doing a research project and would like to view in quite a lot of detail (as in for a long time) some large pdf files of lecture notes and the odd ebook. However, I can't find something that makes reading things on screen comfortable that has support for pdf files. I thought I might of found it in booKreader but it doesn't seem to understand pdf format. A further possible complication is that I am a Maths student so most documents are typeset in Latex. Does anyone know of any software that might help me out?

Calv

barebones

Member

Registered: 2006-04-30

Posts: 235

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

The only that I've found that allows me to comfortably read e-books is, unfortunatly, acroread. It's big, slow, ugly, and the only linux program that I've found that makes plain text readible for long periods, and sometimes, its the only program that can even display some of my pdf's.

cycle

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 42

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

xpdf is the only one i use

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

i use evince or epdfview, but i haven't read something that is longer than a few pages so i don't know how it affects your eyes. you can try i though.

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

I'm quite happy with evince, that's the default gnome pdf-viewer and the only one I use (for all my latex stuff too).
I used to use kpdf which is very good to but I prefer gtk over qt

In fact I think acroread is the worst of them all, I can't even open multiple documents with it??? I uninstalled it when I found that out

Last edited by Ramses de Norre (2007-06-27 08:58:31)

briest

Member

From: Katowice, PL

Registered: 2006-05-04

Posts: 468

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

I think acroread is the worst of them all, I can't even open multiple documents with it??? I uninstalled it when I found that out

Oh.

Acroread is heavy indeed and I prefer xpdf; I've heard that you can make it faster by removing plugins and compressing the main binary, but I did not try.

skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

You should consider converting your PDFs to another format. The poppler package includes pdftohtml, which produces fairly good results. I'm not sure how it would handle the more complex LaTeX stuff (diagrams, formulas, etc). It may just convert them to images.

barebones

Member

Registered: 2006-04-30

Posts: 235

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

Just to show you why I use acroread (it was truly a sad day when I made the switch), here is a comparison of the same pdf in xpdf and in acroread.
Acroread
Xpdf

It's still readable, I guess, this is kinda a best case scenario. On some of my files text won't even show up in anything but acroread.

calvinthomas

Member

Registered: 2007-06-24

Posts: 15

Re: A PDF/Book Viewer

Thank you for all the responses, after some thought in to what that actual problem was I realised that part of the problem was the bright white background, looking at some books I had about I noticed that often the packages were a much more dingy colour, somewhere between white, grey and yellow. Fiddling with the background colours a bit to get something like this for acroread has made things easier to read.

Calv