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Comment by synack | Hacker News Reader

Evince on Linux is by far the best program I've found for reading large PDFs. It's worth the trouble to setup a VM or WSL just to run Evince if you're not natively on Linux.

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Another terrific option is Okular. It actually has a setting to reduce memory usage on large PDF files by not prerendering pages that are not being viewed.

Eek, Okular. The one time I resorted to downgrading a package in 20+ years of using Linux. A few years back, someone drank too much design Kool-Aid and introduced smooth scrolling without making it optional. That did not get a very good reception from everyone, as browsing 20,000-page reference manuals with buttery smooth scrolling is, literally, dizzying.

I don't know if it ever got fixed. I stopped using Linux around the time when it was introduced, and having had to revert to using xpdf for browsing large PDFs like it was 1994 again was part of why I ragequit :-(.

I've never opened a 20,000 page document, but I've opened documents of several hundred pages with no noticeable issues. Pressing either Space or PgDown instantly moves the page down, no scrolling animation. The option still does not exist, but it seems that the feature doesn't exist either.

IIRC the eventual fix was to have it respect the global compositor settings, so if you have animation speed set to instant, while it does actually smooth scroll, it does so instantly. However, when it was introduced, it did not; for similar reasons (i.e. I don't like nausea), I had animations disabled, but Okular did its thing, and slowly.

It took some time for it to land though and not without the kind of discussions that you see on the Gnome bug tracker. It was pretty disheartening.

I've actually been using an (ancient) build of Evince for Windows [0] for quite some time now.

[0] https://www.fosshub.com/Evince.html

I've never had to read a large PDFs (probably, ~400 pages) but what's so great about Evince? Is it just speed or is it because of it's features?

One feature I really like is that if you hover over a link Evince previews the target of the link in a little box. Perfect for "see Table X on page Y"

I use Evince on Linux and PDF Expert on MacOS. They both do okay, but neither does search indexing, so searching goes irritatingly slow. Also neither support the public key encrypted PDFs that a certain SoC vendor likes to give me.

Sumatra PDF on windows is very fast.

I like it so much in fact that I've been looking for a linux alternative and haven't been satisfied yet. I will try evince though.

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