I just want to scream so much about the lack of good beginner friendly PDF readers on linux. It’s so frustrating! Gnome’s “Evince Document Viewer” apparently doesn’t even have a way to change the highlight color permanently, all of my annotations are in white color!! WTF!!! And on top of that every time I make an annotation and use “Ctrl + S” to save, it just tries to open a “Save as” window instead!!! WTF?!
I tried to look around, and I badly want SumatraPDF on linux… it’s just soooo much better but unfortunately they don’t have a linux version
I tried Okular, and because I’m on Gnome the KDE styled window is all glaring white on my eyes, atleast have a dark mode… I was confused about how to add annotations / highlights on this editor too.
I’m really just done with PDF readers on linux, they are just shit. My hope right now is to get Firefox’s pdf viewer to work with Dark Reader plugin so I can atleast get decent way to read pdf files on linux.
You talk about beginnner PDF viewer, then you talk about annotation, which is an advanced feature.
What is it you want? Do you want beginner features, or advanced features?
I’ve found Linux Mint’s Document Viewer quite nice, but no annotation - as far as I’m aware.
There’s also Zathura. It doesn’t get faster than this, but it - as far as I’m aware - does not support annotation. It should be in the repositories of your distribution.
BTW: LibreOffice can also view PDF documents. I know, it’s overkill, but probably is capable of what you want (I never used this myself).
Also: Bard (the AI) suggested Xournal++ has the features you’re looking for. It’s not meant as a PDF viewer, but should be capable of what you want.
EDIT: Just checked Xournal++. It’s probably exactly what you want, regarding PDF annotation.
I use Master PDF editor. It is a paid product (not one of those monthly/yearly subscription though) There is a demo to try out to see if it does what you need.
I’ve used Foxit reader in the past (and still have it installed for a few features), but tend to more and more just use the PDF reader embedded in Firefox. That one also supports annotation. Not sure how much I can customize in it though. I guess I don’t care enough about that.
Anyways… annotating in white seems like a bad setting, I can’t imagine that being the default. So one way or another, that got set somewhere.
Annotations / Highlighting PDFs is quite a beginner feature. I can imagine editing PDFs to be a more advanced feature set. I tried Zathura, It looks cool but I couldn’t figure out how to do highlights from their documentation
I was a bit frustrated so I might have overlooked / missed a few things.
I gave Okular another go and I finally found the annotations (they were hidden under some menu bar)… Seems like it’s working okay now, I can highlight in dark mode and also save instead of “Save As”.
Great.
BTW: you can also create user-defined keyboard shortcuts for various actions.
I assigned “CTRL+I” to “toggling between normal mode and dark mode”.
Sorry, I can´t help you with this one.
As you can see im my screenshots (my post #8) it´s the same on my system (Linux Lite). The main window uses colour inversion, but that´s it, it seems.
Perhaps someone else can help.
Here is what Copilot says for that. Take that with a grain of salt, because just today, I asked Copilot something about Ubuntu 24.04 and Gnome regarding the dock and it made up some setting that doesn’t exist. I suppose a good backup is always a good idea before making changes.
Me:
I am using Gnome on Ubuntu 24.04 and the program Okular doesn’t seem to follow the system dark or light them. How can I make it dark?
Copilot:
To enable dark mode in Okular on Ubuntu 24.04, you can follow these steps:
Install KDE System Settings: Since Okular is a KDE application, you can use KDE System Settings to change its theme.
sudo apt install systemsettings
Open KDE System Settings: Run the following command to open KDE System Settings:
systemsettings
Change the Theme:
Navigate to Appearance.
Select Application Style.
Choose Breeze Dark or another dark theme from the list.
Apply the Changes: Click Apply to save the changes.
This should apply the dark theme to Okular. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!
