Evince (), also known as GNOME Document Viewer, is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

document viewer A file viewer is a utility application software on operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, or Windows. The file viewer is responsible for user access of files located on a data storage device. File viewers allow the user to open and view conte ...

supporting many

document file format A document file format is a Text file, text or binary file format for storing documents on a computer storage, storage media, especially for use by computers. There currently exists a multitude of incompatible document file formats. Examples of ...

s including

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

, DjVu,

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

, XPS and DVI. It is designed for the

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

. The developers of Evince intended to replace the multiple GNOME

document A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ', which denotes ...

viewers with a single and simple application. The Evince motto sums up the project aim: "Simply a Document Viewer". 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 A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel (operating system), kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply distribution (marketing), product distribution pe ...

that ship GNOME as their default desktop environment — including

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

and

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to b ...

— include or have included Evince as the default document viewer. Evince is free and open-source software subject to the requirements of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

version 2 or later. The Evince FAQ highlights the meaning of the word "Evince" as "to show or express something clearly". In 2025, Evince will be replaced as the default document viewer in GNOME by a GTK 4 & Libadwaita hard fork of itself called Papers.

History

Evince began as a rewrite of GPdf, 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

2.12. 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". In either GNOME 48 or 49, Evince will be replaced as the default document viewer by a GTK 4 & Libadwaita hard fork of itself called Papers. Ubuntu 25.04 will likely be the first distro shipping GNOME by default to replace Evince with Papers. Joey Sneddon of ''OMG! Ubuntu'' suggested that the reason that the GNOME developers made a new document viewer application was that it would take a lot of work for Evince, a 20 year old program at the time of the decision, to be ported over to GTK 4 & Libadwaita, hence why a new application hard forked from Evince's codebase was made rather than continuing to rework Evince proper was made. This was similar to why Gedit, Eye of GNOME, and

Cheese Cheese is a type of dairy product produced in a range of flavors, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein. It comprises proteins and fat from milk (usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats or sheep). During prod ...

were replaced by GNOME Text Editor, Loupe, and Snapshot respectively rather than port the existing applications over to GTK 4 and Libadwaita.

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)

thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-o ...

s 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. 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 DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militair ...

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 GConf was a system used by the GNOME desktop environment for storing configuration settings for the desktop and applications. It is similar to the Windows Registry. It was deprecated as part of the GNOME 3 transition. Migration to its replac ...

. Since version 3.18.2, Evince allows for text and highlight annotations of documents.

Supported document formats

Evince supports many different single and multi-page document formats: ;Built-in support *

using the Poppler backend *

using the

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization of documents in these language,, the display or prin ...

backend. * Multi-page

* DVI * DjVu using the DjVuLibre backend * OpenDocument Presentation (.odp) when built with the --enable-impress option *

Images An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a project ...

(currently included as a toy, but needs work) * CBR, CBZ, CB7 (Comic Book Archive file) *

Adobe Illustrator Artwork Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and Computer-aided design, design software developed and marketed by Adobe Inc., Adobe. Originally designed for the Apple Inc., Apple Mac (computer), Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began ...

;Optional support * XPS ;Possible or planned support *

Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, developed by Microsoft. It was originally created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially ...

using libpreview (currently

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter ''aleph'' , whose name comes from the West Semitic word for ' ...

-quality) *

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300, is an open file format for word processor, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Presentation program, presentations and ...

* AbiWord ;Not supported *

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

Mobi Mobi or MOBI may refer to: Companies * Mobi (company) mobi, Inc. is a wireless carrier founded in 2004 and based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. The company provides service on each of the major islands of Hawaiʻi, as well as on the mainland Unit ...

References

External links

* {{GNOME Free PDF readers Free software programmed in C GNOME Core Applications PostScript Office software that uses GTK Free and open-source software

History

Features

Supported document formats

See also

References

External links