Evince

This article is about the document viewer. For a definition of the term "evince", see the Wiktionary entry evince.

Evince (/ˈɛvɪns/), also known as GNOME Document Viewer, is a free and open-source document viewer supporting many document file formats including PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS and DVI. It is designed for the GNOME desktop environment.^[3]

Evince

GNOME Evince 40 (released in March 2021)
Other names	GNOME Document Viewer
Developer(s)	The Evince Team[1]
Stable release	46.3[2]  / 25 May 2024; 5 months ago (25 May 2024)
Repository	gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince.git
Written in	Primarily C, C++
Operating system	Linux and other Unix-like systems
Type	Document viewer
License	GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince

The developers of Evince intended to replace the multiple GNOME document viewers with a single and simple application. The Evince motto sums up the project aim: "Simply a Document Viewer".^[3]

GNOME releases have included Evince since GNOME 2.12 (September 2005). Evince's code is written mainly in C, with a small part (specifically, the interface with Poppler) written in C++. Many Linux distributions—including Ubuntu, Fedora Linux and Linux Mint—include Evince as the default document viewer.

Evince is free and open-source software subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

The Evince FAQ highlights the meaning of the word "Evince" as "to show or express something clearly".^[4]

History

Evince began as a rewrite of GPdf,^[5] which its support programmers had started to find unwieldy to maintain. Evince quickly surpassed the functionality of GPdf and replaced both GPdf and GGV in the September 2005 release of GNOME 2.12.^[6][7]

There was at one time a Windows version of Evince and it was then included on the VALO-CD, a collection of "Best of Free and Open Source Software for Windows".^[8][9][10]

Features

Evince incorporates an integrated search that displays the number of results found and highlights the results on the page. Users can optionally display (in the left sidebar of the viewer) thumbnails of pages to assist in page navigation within a document. When documents support indices, Evince gives the option of showing the document index for quickly moving from one section to another.^[11]

Evince can show two pages at a time, left and right, and offers full-screen and slide-show views.

Evince allows the selection of text in PDF files and allows users to highlight and copy text from documents made from scanned images, if the PDF includes OCR data.

Evince used to obey the DRM restrictions of PDF files, which may prevent copying, printing, or converting some PDF files, however this has been made optional, and turned off by default in gconf.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Since version 3.18.2 evince allows for text and highlight annotations of documents.^{[citation needed]}

Supported document formats

Evince supports many different single and multi-page document formats:^[16]

Built-in support

• PDF using the Poppler backend
• PostScript using the Ghostscript backend.
• Multi-page TIFF
• DVI
• DjVu using the DjVuLibre backend
• OpenDocument Presentation (.odp) when built with the --enable-impress option
• Images (currently included as a toy, but needs work)
• CBR, CBZ, CB7 (Comic Book Archive file)
• Adobe Illustrator Artwork^[17]

Optional support

• XPS

Possible or planned support

• Microsoft PowerPoint using libpreview (currently alpha-quality)
• Microsoft Word
• OpenDocument
• AbiWord

Not supported

• EPUB
• Mobi

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• List of PDF software

References

1. "Evince/Team – GNOME Live!". wiki.gnome.org. 6 August 2011. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
2. "Evince 46.3".
3. "Apps/Evince - GNOME Wiki!". GNOME. Archived from the original on 27 December 2019. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
4. "Frequently Asked Questions about Evince". The GNOME Project. 13 October 2015. Archived from the original on 7 August 2016. Retrieved 28 July 2016. Q: What does the word Evince mean? [...] A: Evince means to show or express something clearly.
5. "Gpdf - Free Software Directory". directory.fsf.org. Retrieved 21 August 2022.
6. Villa, Louis (June 2005). "ggv/gpdf and evince". Archived from the original on 11 April 2016. Retrieved 14 May 2016.
7. "GNOME 2.12 Release Notes". Archived from the original on 22 November 2017. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
8. KekÀlÀinen, Otto. "VALO-CD". VALO-CD. Archived from the original on 22 July 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2020.
9. VALO-CD programs Archived 2017-12-13 at the Wayback Machine, retrieved 24 February 2012
10. "The Best of Free and Open Source Software for Windows". Valo-Cd. Archived from the original on 22 July 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
11. The GNOME Project (February 2008). "Evince – Features". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 11 May 2009.
12. PDF printing restrictions Archived 2014-09-11 at the Wayback Machine "The document viewer overrides this restriction by default"
13. "Bug 305818 – allow the user to override document restrictions". bugzilla.gnome.org. Archived from the original on 1 April 2019. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
14. "DRM protected PDF files". nabble.com. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
15. "Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions [LWN.net]". lwn.net. Archived from the original on 25 May 2021. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
16. "Apps/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats - GNOME Wiki!". wiki.gnome.org. Archived from the original on 7 November 2017. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
17. "evince - View multipage documents". git.gnome.org. Archived from the original on 29 April 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2017.

External links

• Official website