_
(Apologies to everyone who has heard my PDF rant before.)
_
Reading PDFs on Linux sucks. That is, it used to suck, until the
desktop group at Red Hat released
the result of a weekend hack-fest:
Evince.
Evince is brilliant. The project has only been alive for ~2
months, but already its the best document viewer available for
Linux. PDF, PS, images; it does them all (DVI and multi-page TIFF
coming soon!). Tasty features include: Type-ahead find, page
thumbnails, document index, and full-screen mode for presentations. I
have yet to come across another PDF reader for Linux that just lets me
read my document, without having to deal with UI quirks (this includes
nasty-pants acroread), the way that Evince does.
The MacOS X’ers out there are now screaming “What about
Preview.app?!” (though they may not say ‘dot app’). Yes, Apple struck
gold with Preview; I love it dearly, too. Surely, whatever incremental
improvements Evince has over Preview will find their way into Mac OS
10.5,
“Scottish Fold”
, but it will never be as good as Evince.
Why, you ask? Well, Ladies and Gentleman, I give you definitive proof as
to why Preview.app is not as good as Evince:
Preview doesn’t run on Ubuntu.