Background
After rebuilding my laptop with a debian net-install I found myself in need of a PDF viewer. I typically go with evince but found it brought in a lot of dependencies and was quite large (34mb). So I decided to do a quick search for PDF viewers in the sid repo and compare, here’s what I found:
| Application | Size | Memory | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| apvlv | 2,892kb | 206m/16m/9324 | toc, not sure about search or links, no menu, seems shortcut key driven |
| epdfview | 989kb | 308m/22m/10m | not light on resources; toc, search,has nav menu |
| evince | 34.3mb | nice GUI but a bit large on file size and dependencies | |
| mupdf | 6,126kb | 55544/11m/3140 | very minimal: nav with arrow keys only: no toc: links |
| okular | 314mb | too large for the job at hand | |
| pdfcube | 1,396kb | 236m/40m/14m | shortcut key driven, cube effect is awesome! |
| qpdfview | 25.6mb | too large for the job at hand | |
| viewpdf.app | 19.1mb | too large | |
| xpdf | 2,672kb | 78236/10m/5116 | toc, nav, search: traditional (albeit clunky) l&f |
| zathura | 3,628kb | 219m/12m/9212 | pretty basic, no apparent toc or menu, no links, a small step above mupdf but at a significant memory cost (not worth it) |
note: memory usage is in the form of VIRT/RES/SHR
Of the above, I dug a bit deeper into apvlv, epdfview, mupdf, pdfcube, xpdf, and zathura to see if they had the following key (to me) functionality:
- toc - Table of Contents
- search - ability to search within the doc
- print - ability to print within the doc
- goto - ability to go to a specific page number of the doc
- select - ability to select (copy) text from the doc
- links - does links within the doc work
The results are as follows:
| App | toc | search | goto | select | links | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| apvlv | y | y | ? | y | y | ? | hokey app, didn't like how it works |
| epdfview | y | y | y | y | y | y | standard GUI app, easy to us |
| mupdf | ? | y | ? | y | ? | y | very lightweight, simplistic viewer, keyboard driven |
| pdfcube | ? | ? | ? | y | ? | ? | blown away by the cube interface but missing too much needed functionality |
| xpdf | y | y | y | y | y | y | all needed functionality but very clunky looking |
| zathura | y | y | y | y | y | y | very similar to mupdf (fork possibly?) but a lot heavier on memory footprint |
pdfcube was an awesome viewer, great concept and worked well but as mentioned above it lacks a lot of key functionality. With that being said, I am going with mupdf as it is so lightweight - and for those things it misses I’ll have xpdf around as well!
