evince

Evince is a lightweight document viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. It provides a single, consistent interface for viewing multiple document formats, aiming to replace multiple format-specific viewers. It is free and open-source software developed by the GNOME project.

Supported formats include PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS, and DVI. Rendering is powered by the Poppler library for PDFs, with support for the other formats provided by their respective backends. The viewer is built with the GTK toolkit and integrates with GNOME workflows and dialogs.

User interface features include a tabbed document view, a side panel that can show thumbnails, outlines, or search results, and standard navigation controls. Users can search text, jump by outline entries, zoom and rotate pages, switch between single-page and continuous scrolling, and enter full-screen presentation mode. Printing is supported to allow physical copies of documents.

Under the hood, Evince is designed to be lightweight and accessible, focusing on simplicity and performance. It is distributed with GNOME and is available on most Linux distributions and other Unix-like systems that ship GNOME components.

History and status: Evince was created to provide a unified document viewer for GNOME as a replacement for earlier viewers. It has evolved alongside GNOME and remains a commonly used default document viewer in many GNOME-based environments, with ongoing development and maintenance by the GNOME community.