Fast Loading PDF Reader for Ubuntu: ePDFView

Ubuntu Linux (Unity desktop included) comes with a built in PDF viewer called Evince (more than a PDF viewer, a document viewer actually) which loads fast and does its job quite well.

But if you're looking for PDF reader that loads even faster (not by a huge margin, slightly faster) + that doesn't depend on Gnome desktop libraries as with Evince... then ePDFView a pretty good utility.

Main features...

*. A very basic/simple GUI (one of the reasons behind that speed, I guess).

*. Search for Text.

*. Switch between the Scroll or the Text selection modes (although while I used it, I couldn't select text at all. I was able to select the text but as soon as I let go of the left-mouse button, the text got unselected!).

*. Show/Hide the PDF index.

*. Send to Print.

*. Save as a Copy.

*. Rotate, zoom-in/out, Full screen, etc.

*. Tool-bar (which includes the above mentioned tools + next/previous page tools, etc).

*. Change the Web Browser that opens the URL links inside the PDF content.

That's about it for the features actually. So, don't hope for a shi* load of features since it's not the idea behind ePDFView. According to the developers, they just wanted create a fast loading, resources friendly PDF viewer that has very little dependencies.

You can install epdfview in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 11.10, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install epdfview

Again, this is certainly not the best but if you have a "thing" for speed ;-), then ePDFview deserves giving a try (except for that above mentioned Text related, bug which can make it pretty useless for some, especially if you want to copy the content to a separate text file).