Which pdf reader should I get? that I can get with pacman?

General system Newbie
1

I am looking for something like the Sumatra Pdf that I use on windows11, it’s simple quick and compact

It reads pdf and has the ability of showing a list of contents of books , I’m pretty sure it also can read epub files and it has tabs like chrome for recently opened pdf files, it keeps them there after being open

I need it to be downloadable with pacman, i’m not risking it again with yay

2

Which DE are you using?

3

cinnamon

4

Try xreader, it’s lightweight and doesn’t come with many dependencies from another DE.

2 Likes
5

are you sure I can get it with pacman -S ? it appears in extra repos of arch

6

Yes and on another note. You’re not risking anything using Yay, it installs both Arch repo packages as well as AUR packages.

7

The extra repo is part of the official Arch repo.

1 Like
8

maybe not… i’m new to arch, i’m a bit skeptical of everything , my bad :confused:

9

Just try it, otherwise we wouldn’t have shipped it by default, if it was a risk.

10

Some other great options are:

  • Okular
  • Evince
11

Another vote for xreader! I use it on a regular basis and am very pleased with it!

1 Like
12

I use Zathura with a few add ons, they are in the repos as:
zathura
zathura-cb
zathura-pdf-mupdf
it is an extremely small and simple PDF, epub and cbz (comic book) reader. You can change the colors of the text as well so it can be rendered in a nice theme instead of black and white. Its good if you want simplicity, I use it purely for reading. I highly recommend it, just make sure to read the config options or jack someone else’s config file.

13

Easy way to find stuff - and determine if it is AUR or Arch-
yay pdf reader

Here’s a piece of the answer (it found 32 entries, here’s the last few)

7 aur/foxitreader 2.4.5.0727-1 (+463 0.44) 
    A fast, secure and complete PDF viewer
6 aur/yacreader-poppler 9.13.1-1 (+2 0.00) (Out-of-date: 2024-02-05) 
    Comic reader for cross-platform reading and managing your digital comic collection, using poppler for PDF
5 extra/xreader 4.0.2-1 (1.1 MiB 5.7 MiB) [x-apps] 
    Document viewer for files like PDF and Postscript. X-Apps Project.
4 extra/deepin-reader 5.10.29-7 (3.2 MiB 7.5 MiB) [deepin-extra] 
    A simple PDF reader, supporting bookmarks, highlights and annotations
3 extra/texlive-latexextra 2023.66594-20 (24.1 MiB 78.9 MiB) [texlive] 
    TeX Live - LaTeX additional packages
2 extra/pdfjs-legacy 4.0.379-1 (3.9 MiB 17.3 MiB) 
    PDF reader in javascript - legacy distribution
1 extra/pdfjs 4.0.379-1 (3.8 MiB 15.6 MiB) 
    PDF reader in javascript
==> Packages to install (eg: 1 2 3, 1-3 or ^4)
==>

You might also want to know of pacseek (yay pacseek-bin) which tidies this task up considerably (as well as allowing installs too).

Value judgements on which are covered elsewhere - but at least you’ll know which to ask about!

1 Like
14

See this list: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PDF,_PS_and_DjVu#Graphical

15

sweet got it right. zathura all the way.

16

I personally just use Firefox. There usually is no need having a reader, imo. Unless you have some specific work cases.

Otherwise Firefox can do all the basic tasks.

17

I actually find it( Firefox) very slow , especially cuz I have to deal with huge pdf files with 800-1000 pages and many of the pages are pictures and scans, and I compared it with the windows 11 version of Sumatra and the same pdf opens instantly