Evince Project
December 16th, 2007 by WaltNow that I have this new laptop with Ubuntu, I’m using the software it came with it to read PDFs and PS files, Evince. I had never heard of the software before, but I’m fairly impressed. It does a good job of rendering pages, and (unlike Acrobat Reader) does not paralyze my browser once a day.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:33 am
The one real gripe I’ve got with evince (at least the version that comes with the linux distributions I’ve tried) is that if you’re looking at a paper setup with large margins/multicolumn text and move the area your window views horizontally (typically after zooming in to make stuff readable), when you page-down to another pager the reader decides to reset the horizontal view to start at the left margin. This means that, particularly on mobile device screens, you’re constantly moving horizontally. (Other viewers like xdvi seem to get that keeping the horizontal position on page change is a good idea.)
There’s a bug registered about this but it doesn’t seem to be being noticed. Other than that, evince is quite a nice program.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Yes, Evince is quite handy, and I have found Ubuntu to be a very satisfactory O/S for getting work done, with very few visits from Murphy. Be sure to use the Ubuntu updater.
If you have trouble printing PDF documents from Evince, try using a printer driver other than the ‘Postscript’ one. For some reason, the Ubuntu developers have assigned a ‘low’ priority to fixing this bug.
December 19th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I like Evince too. However, at least my version (Ubuntu Feisty) plunges into a vegetative state if the underlying GS interpreter crashes. I have to close all Evince windows to revive it, not just the one running the bad Postscript.