If there is one thing the open source community is not short of it is document viewers. We have published articles on a couple of them in the past not excluding Buka, Bookworm, and Easy Ebook Viewer.
Today, we introduce to you another document viewer you can use to read ePub ebooks and PDFs and it goes by the name of Okular, is an open source and cross-platform KDE-developed document viewer and it ships together with the KDE application release.
This means that if you run KDE then you probably have Okular installed on your system. The document viewer has support for a variety of document formats including PDF, ePub, XPS, DjVu, CHM, and Postscript, among others.
With PDF documents, users can add comments, highlight sections, and add several shapes without affecting the original file. Okular also features an inbuilt reading service (Jovie), along with the ability to extract text from eBooks into separate text files.
Features in Okular
- FOSS: Okular is free to download and use with its source code freely available at KDE’s Community Wiki.
- Cross-platform: Enjoy a uniform service across GNU/Linux, BSDs, Mac, and Windows platforms.
- PDF editing functions including commenting, highlighting, managing thumbnails, bookmarking, etc.
- A customizable User Interface with toggable options bars.
- Review mode: View all the document pages at once in a grid form.
- A variety of backends including PDF, TIFF< DjVu, etc.
- Support for annotations.
- Extract embedded files from documents.
You can easily install Okular on your Ubuntu distro with a single command.
$ sudo apt-get install okular
If you would rather not use the command line then check out alternative installation methods not only for your distro but for other platforms by following the button below.
[mks_button size=”medium” title=”Download Okular for Linux” style=”squared” url=”https://okular.kde.org/download.php” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” bg_color=”#46698E” txt_color=”#fff” icon=”fa-download” icon_type=”fa” nofollow=”1″]
Have you come across Okular before? How does it compare to your default document viewer and which other apps do you have to add to our virtual suggestion box? Drop your comments in the conversation section below.
My preference of Okular over Adobe Reader DC is it has less functions but several useful ones. Particualrly annotations (can change properies including highlight, underline etc).I do not use bookmark largely because individual file book mark location is cumbersome (it shows book marks of all the files?). Besides copying option both text & image.
However recently update Okular (window 11) removes THIS highlight property. A fall back on older version inevitable. May be if this disabled search for a substitue for Okular. Hope they restore older version on winodows.
I use Okular and for the most part it performs well with PDFs. The main advantage in its support for PDFs is that it allows you to print pages from a PDF with PDF as output. So you can print pages from a magazine PDF which might be 25MB in size to a smaller PDF that might be 1MB in side.
Where the problem comes is epub files. A certain percentage of epub files will not open at all or open VERY slowly. Also, a number of epub files will open and then show essentially blacked out pages. I’m not sure whether this is the fault of Okular or badly formed epub files, but it is very annoying. Only Calibre can open epub files with pretty much no problem unless the file is corrupted in some way.
Also, Okular has not been updated in years and is apparently an orphaned project. Would be nice if someone took up the mantle.
Okular is one of the best kept secrets. KDE applications are always pretty impressive and Okular is no exception. I like that it is able to open just about any document format there is. It also has features not found in other document viewers. I have used Okular as my go-to PDF viewer since I made the switch and never needed to change. Bookworm is another great application I now use thanks to your informative articles. Its management capabilities make it a must have.
I recently stumbled upon a very cool mind-mapping utility from KDE called Semantik. It is one of the best open-source applications of its kind and I am surprised it is not more well known. Maybe you could check into it and inform the masses. Thanks again for your great work.