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#1 2011-02-04 21:11:18

Archie_Enthusiasm
Member
Registered: 2010-10-23
Posts: 99

good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Hello folks,

I am looking for a good pdf viewer (would be nice if it could support pdf editiing) to view same pdf document at the same time. Document viewer is good enough but when I want to view the same pdf file which is already open with Document viewer, I can not open the file with Document viewer again. Therefore I am looking for a good pdf viewer. I have installed pdfedit, but it seems like over kill for pdf viewing purpose. Which tools do you use?

thanks!

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#2 2011-02-04 21:30:31

phx
Member
Registered: 2010-07-24
Posts: 2

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Evince is my favourite pdf viewer. However it seems that if I attempt to open the same document a second time, it just brings the first instance up. Have you thought about just making a second copy of the document?

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#3 2011-02-04 21:31:40

mits
Member
From: Bucharest/Romania
Registered: 2008-01-10
Posts: 129

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

For me foxitreader for windows (commerciall version) instaled with wine is perfect.

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#4 2011-02-04 21:33:44

phx
Member
Registered: 2010-07-24
Posts: 2

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Foxit is a great reader, I happily run it on windows. But isnt using wine for a pdf reader a bit overkill?

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#5 2011-02-04 21:47:55

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

mupdf - but it doesn't support editing.


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#6 2011-02-04 21:57:31

Archie_Enthusiasm
Member
Registered: 2010-10-23
Posts: 99

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

foxit is not in our official repo. therefore not a choice for me. I will try mupdf, but will wait for some more opinions.

@phx: document viewer also does the same thing. I always checks first whether the file is already open, when yes, it just brings the already running instance up which is kind of "not a bug but a feature"

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#7 2011-02-04 22:09:30

frabjous
Member
Registered: 2010-07-13
Posts: 367

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Here you go:

#!/bin/bash
PDFNAME="$1"
TEMPNAME="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)"
cp "$PDFNAME" "$TEMPNAME"
evince "$TEMPNAME"
rm "$TEMPNAME"

Now you can open the same PDF as many times as you want with evince.

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#8 2011-02-05 01:26:29

fsckd
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2009-06-15
Posts: 4,173

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Archie_Enthusiasm wrote:

foxit is not in our official repo. therefore not a choice for me.

foxitreader is in AUR but the Linux version trails the Windows version in functionality. so umm, good call?


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#9 2011-02-05 07:11:41

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,740

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Believe it or not, Emacs makes a pretty good pdf reader.  I especially like it if you are using Emacs and LaTex to generate the pdfs you are trying to view.

I've not tried it, but apparently LibreOffice can not only import them, but edit and save them as well.  I was thinking about trying that this weekend.


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#10 2011-02-05 13:10:40

bernarcher
Forum Fellow
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-02-17
Posts: 2,281

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

ewaller wrote:

I've not tried it, but apparently LibreOffice can not only import them, but edit and save them as well.  I was thinking about trying that this weekend.

I needed to work with libreoffice pdf import/export last week. It is not perfect, yet proved usable.

For instance, the pdf's are imported as draw objects, keeping each text line in a separate frame which makes editing a bit awkward. And some complicated constructed images (featuring multiple layers) were severely misplaced.

Last edited by bernarcher (2011-02-05 13:13:29)


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#11 2011-02-05 16:12:24

rttommy
Member
Registered: 2007-12-27
Posts: 19

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Epdfview is basically evince without gnome dependencies, and you can view multiple instances of the same file. No editing though.

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#12 2011-02-05 16:40:36

fsckd
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Registered: 2009-06-15
Posts: 4,173

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

For very, very simple PDF editing I use xournal. For authorship I used OOo (now will use LibreOffice) and LaTeX stuff. PDFedit is too complicated for me.

For PDF viewing I use xpdf (for -rv) and epdfview (for when I don't care for rv).

All of these allow multiple concurrent opening of a single PDF document.


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#13 2011-02-05 18:44:42

frabjous
Member
Registered: 2010-07-13
Posts: 367

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

Inkscape will also import PDFs, allow you to make edits, and then re-export to PDF.

AbiWord has a PDF import feature, though I doubt it's better than the LibreOffice one.

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#14 2011-02-05 20:11:56

v43
Member
Registered: 2011-02-03
Posts: 140

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

i think i tried them all.
i believe okular is the best around (the only one who could compare to foxit or acrobat reader), but it still lacks one essential feature: HIGHLIGHTING. so i ended up installing foxit with wine, and now i'm happy.
most of linux pdf viewers are really crappy anyway. the image quality in xpdf (and another i can't remember.. evince?) is just awful.
the only linux pdf viewer with highlight is pdf-xchange, but... it doesn't come for free, does it?

PS: foxit reader in aur isn't worth a thing

Last edited by v43 (2011-02-05 20:15:25)

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#15 2011-02-05 20:33:51

Archie_Enthusiasm
Member
Registered: 2010-10-23
Posts: 99

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

is there any okular for gnome ?

asking this because you can see below:

> pacman -Ss okular
extra/kdegraphics-okular 4.6.0-1 (kde kdegraphics)
    Document Viewer




@all: thanks for the great responses. it is getting complicated. For only pdf viewing and editing, installing wine is a overkill, isn't it? Maybe I should be go with evince or epdfview or mupdf.... I think they should be fine for viewing purpose. any other pdf editing tools other than pdfedit but for linux OSs?

Thanks

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#16 2011-02-05 21:03:50

pogeymanz
Member
Registered: 2008-03-11
Posts: 1,020

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

There is an annoying bug in EPDFView that causes it to crash whenever you try to print a temporary file (i.e., when you click "open" in your browser when clicking a pdf link)


Also, PDFs looked really terrible for me in Emacs. Is there something I missed?

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#17 2011-02-06 01:06:35

frabjous
Member
Registered: 2010-07-13
Posts: 367

Re: good pdf viewer with different functionalitites

I think the PDF viewer built in to Mendeley supports highlighting, and it has a Linux native client (mendeleydesktop in AUR), though last I tried it, I wasn't very impressed.

Archie_Enthusiasm wrote:

is there any okular for gnome ?

isn't it? Maybe I should be go with evince or epdfview or mupdf.... I think they should be fine for viewing purpose. any other pdf editing tools other than pdfedit but for linux OSs?

What kind of editing do you need to do? There are a lot of apps for combing PDFs, adding pages, cropping them, etc. (PDFsam, PDFshuffler, PDFmod, jPDFtweak, PDFjam, pdftk with various GUIs, etc.) But if you mean actually editing the text (in which case it's far better generally to go back to the source file, if available), then there's not much beyond what has already been mentioned.

There are some webapps though you could use with Linux, like PDFescape, PDFHammer, TouchPDF, etc. I don't have a lot of experience with them.

In general, I think there are more and at least as good PDF tools for Linux than there are for Windows. The thing is, however, that they follow the Unix philosophy and hence focus on doing only one thing (and doing it well), so you need different programs for doing different things. I use mupdf or evince for viewing PDFs, pdflatex for creating PDFs, pdfsam or pdftk for splitting and combining them, jPDFtweak for changing metadata or bookmarks, BRISS for cropping them, ghostscript or calibre for converting them, etc. No one tool does it all, but all together, I'm perfectly content.

Last edited by frabjous (2011-02-06 01:07:41)

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