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Comment by donniezazen | Hacker News Reader

Okular[1] is the best PDF Reader on Linux. Enough said.

[1]http://okular.kde.org/

What does it provide that other options like zathura doesn't? Just asking; no offense intended.

Mostly KDE itegration and support for a really broad array of formats. Most people probably don't use it as such, but it's more of a general document viewer. (For example, you can actually open Microsoft .ppt files with it.)

It's a great pdf viewer, and has plenty of features, but so do most of the other well-known ones.

I love it, but I'd probably use something else if I wasn't using KDE as my desktop environment. It's lightweight if you're already loading all of the KDE libraries, but rather heavyweight otherwise.

I had been using it long before I started using KDE. There aren't many PDF Viewers that could do annotations and handle 1000 page PDFs. Evince which is a premier Gnome PDF application is pretty basic.

I will have to try Zathura but since KDE is my choice of desktop environment Okular comes natural. Long before I was using KDE, I needed a feature full PDF viewer and I found Okular. I mostly need annotations which it does fine. I have since then never felt a need for any other PDF viewer.

Well, zathura is great if you are a vim user, since it comes with all the key bindings and you can configure it like a lot of the tools out there with a dotfile. There's also support for djvu and other formats (although some distros do not have it by default, so you might need to compile it yourself). If you are not a vim user, you are gonna be disappointed, since its major feature is the vim thing imho.

That is nice for some users but again I feel like software including installation should be as easy as possible. We have actually lived in that era where we had to read documentation, install by compiling, and configure with dotfiles. I have had enough of it. I am happy with the basic functionality - read/fill form/annotate - that Okular provides in a dead simple interface and it comes with all format support pre-installed on all distributions that I have used. That's a win-win.

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