Evince is a free document viewer designed to support a wide variety of formats in order to negate the need for many free document viewers. Evince viewer works on both Windows platform, as well as GNOME. This means it is a very useful tool for those who use GNOME in conjunction with their Unix-based operating systems, utilising some of the best open source software on the market.
The file types it covers at the moment are PDF, Postscript, TIFF, DVI and DjVu. There are also plans that in the near future it will support Microsoft Office and Open Office files, making it easier for GNOME users to read a large majority of the documents that they will want to view. Upcoming support like this ensures that Evince is the best free document viewer on the market for those who use GNOME, and Windows.
If you just want a free PDF viewer, you can use Foxit PDF Reader, Sumatra PDF Viewer, or Nuance PDF Reader.
Evince has a series of features, but the main ones are:
- Comprehensive search.
- Page thumbnails.
- Document indexes.
- Document printing.
- Encrypted document viewing.
Search in Evince is very good indeed. It displays the number of results, also highlighting the search terms within the text so that you can clearly see where the word or phrase you wanted to find is. This is extremely useful for those looking to monitor keyword use in SEO-based documents and those looking to make mass edits to a particular phrase.
The ability to view page thumbnails when looking through a document is a major plus point too. It lets the user see at a glance what is on a particular page, allowing navigation through the document to be a much quicker and more efficient process.
In conclusion, Evince is a near perfect free document viewer that only falters in that it doesn’t support the huge range of file formats that you would expect a universal document viewer to. If it were to introduce more support in the near future, it would become spot on.
