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Evince - Adobe reader - Comparison Notes

Environment: Solaris Express Comminity Release build 60 on sparc/Blade 100

Results: Evince is a lightweight PDF reader that covers most of basic functions of acroread but two issues are quite behind acroread.

Legend

(./)

Supported

<!>

Needs improvement

{X}

Unsupported

Items

Evince - 2.25.x

Adobe Reader - 7.0

Note

Basic Function

1. Open and load PDF files

(./)

(./)

Evince pass Acroread sanity testsuite

2. Save a PDF copy to local

(./)

(./)

3. Print

(./)

(./)

4. File Properties

(./)

(./)

5. Search

<!>

(./)

Both tools support basic search function but Acroread support searching keyword in several files at the time and linking to yahoo search by external browser.

6. Rotate View

(./)

(./)

7. Zoom In/Out

<!> Zoom range is 50% -- 400%

(./) Zoom range is 8.33% -- 6400%

Acroread provide wider Zoom range.

Advanced Function

1. Bookmarks

{X}

(./)

Evince doesn't support Bookmark and comments if you open a PDF file with those properites, Evince will ignore those features.

2. Attachments

(./)

(./)

3. Page View

(./)

(./)

Evince support "Continuous" and "Dual". Acroread can layout a PDF file like "Continuous", "Continuous - Facing" and "Facing"

4. Security

<!>

(./)

5. Moving Document

(./)

(./)

Evince supports Drag&Drop to move a document by clicking with middle button.

6. Accessibility

<!>

<!>

at-poke can recognize both Evince and acroread's file menu and push button widget but for content inside document widget, both of them doesn't support. Another word, I can not use orca read PDF content by both them.

7. Performance

<!>

<!>

Evince only takes 1/3 time during startup and take 1/4 memory usage after startup. Evince takes a little longer time to load and render PDF file in average. After load pdf page, for rendering page, Evince is much slower than acroread, especially for the complicated documents.

8. Other kind of files

(./)

<!>

Evince build-in support postscript file but acroread doesn't.

9. PDF Browser plugin

{X}

(./)

Evince doesn't PDF browser plugin

10. PDF file embeded javascript

{X}

(./)

Evince can not handle PDF file with Javascript animation

11. Automatically scroll

(./)

(./)

Evince doesn't support "Automatically scroll"

12. Fill in PDF form

<!>

(./)

Evince has a basic forms support. Some features are still missing like spell checking and signature fields are not supported yet.

13. Back/Forward button

(./)

(./)

14. Optional conent (Layers)

(./)

(./)

Others

1. Platform support

(./) x86 and others

<!> several

2. Open Source

(./) in Gnome community

<!> Proprietary

2024-10-23 10:58