Okular – Universal document viewer

https://okular.kde.org/

by Tomte • 4 years ago

221 88 4 years ago

okular.kde.org

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

skavi3• 4 years ago

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.

rg1113• 4 years ago

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.

GreeningRun• 4 years ago

Can't be agree more I use Sumatra every day

marcodiego• 4 years ago

Not multi-platform, unfortunately.

zuminator2• 4 years ago

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.

Multicomp• 4 years ago

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

MegaDeKay• 4 years ago

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.

skavi3• 4 years ago

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

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

I use this on KDE, on FreeBSD.

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

rg1113• 4 years ago

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

random_walker• 4 years ago

Can it restore state after system restart on Ubuntu?

rg1113• 4 years ago

Yes, definitely.

mr337• 4 years ago

I love okukar and use it regardless of desktop environment.

jarenmf• 4 years ago

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.

N3Xxus_6• 4 years ago

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

smartmic• 4 years ago

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

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

causality02• 4 years ago

I'm playing with it a bit and it doesn't seem to be that great. "Trim margins" doesn't work on images and it takes a bizarrely long time to open a single image file, on the order of four seconds.

nbenitezl• 4 years ago

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

causality02• 4 years ago

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.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

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

Eddy_Viscosity2• 4 years ago

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.

qwerty4561272• 4 years ago

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.

the_third_wave5• 4 years ago

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/

mkl• 4 years ago

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).

stavros2• 4 years ago

Use the "right" mouse button to select an area

There is no wrong mouse button.

hexomancer2• 4 years ago

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

gradstudent• 4 years ago

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.

hexomancer2• 4 years ago

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

lf-non• 4 years ago

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.

lukifer2• 4 years ago

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.

ryukafalz• 4 years ago

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.

lukifer2• 4 years ago

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.)

tsar9x• 4 years ago

Preview is pretty great on macOS.

simongray• 4 years ago

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

smcnally• 4 years ago

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.

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

Since when did HN become Freshmeat?

compressedgas• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135

gerdesj• 4 years ago

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

bitlax2• 4 years ago

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.

bronzecarnage• 4 years ago

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" ```

bitlax2• 4 years ago

This is cool. Thanks.

robonerd• 4 years ago

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.

SkySkimmer• 4 years ago

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.

quasarj• 4 years ago

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

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

Tomte3• 4 years ago

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.

amyjess• 4 years ago

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

SaulJLH• 4 years ago

or winget

makeworld• 4 years ago

Personally I prefer the minimalist UI of Evince.

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

hedora• 4 years ago

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.

limoce• 4 years ago

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.

tasuki2• 4 years ago

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!

adrian_b2• 4 years ago

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.

westcort• 4 years ago

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

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

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

u801e• 4 years ago

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.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

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.

Gentil2• 4 years ago

I was coming here to rant about KDE's long list of unnecessary dependencies on their softwares. But looks like Okular have finally reduced their list of bizzillion unnecessary dependencies. Maybe I am wrong here since I have been away for a while. But I do try and install okular to see how many dependencies is needed from time to time. So it looks like they have. And if so, thanks and kudos!

Also, why do I still need kaccounts-integration dependency package if I am not using KDE? Is there a reason why it is needed? Anybody know?

michaelmrose2• 4 years ago

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.

Gentil2• 4 years ago

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? :)

ossusermivami• 4 years ago

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

Tomte3• 4 years ago

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".

ajaxnet• 4 years ago

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

teekert• 4 years ago

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)…

vanous2• 4 years ago

...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:(

SanchoPanda2• 4 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?

ewuhic• 4 years ago

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

s1291• 4 years ago

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.

mxuribe• 4 years ago

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?

poser-boy• 4 years ago

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.

knighthack• 4 years ago

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.

Okular – Universal document viewer

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