evince

evince [OPTIONS...] [FILES...]

While evince is the primary command, it also provides specialized modes for specific tasks:

evince-previewer [OPTIONS...] [FILES...]

evince-thumbnailer [OPTIONS...] [FILES...]

-i, --display=DISPLAY
    Specify the X display to use.

-p, --page-label=PAGE
    Open the document at the given page label (e.g., 'vi').

-l, --page-index=NUMBER
    Open the document at the given page number (0-indexed).

-f, --fullscreen
    Start Evince in fullscreen mode.

-s, --presentation
    Start Evince in presentation mode.

--find=STRING
    Find the first occurrence of STRING in the document upon opening.

--invert-colors
    Invert the colors of the document for viewing.

-h, --help
    Show Evince's command-line help options.

--version
    Display Evince's version information.

Evince is a free and open-source document viewer designed for the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal is to unify document viewing by replacing multiple, disparate applications with a single, simple, and efficient tool. Evince supports a wide array of document formats including PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, DVI, XPS, and comic book archives (CBR, CBZ). Key features include integrated search, page thumbnails, annotation support, and presentation modes, all aimed at providing a seamless and intuitive user experience within the GNOME ecosystem.

Evince is designed primarily as a document viewer; it offers limited or no editing capabilities. Performance with extremely large or graphically complex documents may vary depending on system resources and the efficiency of the underlying rendering libraries for specific file formats.

Evince boasts extensive format support, enabling users to open a wide variety of documents including: Portable Document Format (PDF), PostScript (PS), DjVu, TIFF, DVI, XPS, SyncTeX, Comic book archives (CBR, CBZ, CB7, CBT), and common image files like PNG, JPEG, GIF.

As a core GNOME application, Evince offers deep integration with the desktop environment. Its broad format compatibility is achieved through a modular architecture, leveraging various rendering backends such as Poppler for PDF, DjVuLibre for DjVu, and libspectre for PostScript, ensuring efficient and accurate display across diverse document types.

Evince was first released in 2005, emerging from the GNOME project with the aim of consolidating various existing document viewers (like GGv and Xpdf) into a single, unified application. Its development focused on providing a consistent, user-friendly interface across different document types. It relies on robust underlying libraries such as Poppler for PDF rendering and has since become the default document viewer for the GNOME desktop, maintaining active development as a core component of the environment.

xpdf(1), okular(1), zathura(1), xdg-open(1), mupdf(1)