Alternatives to Atril
The MATE desktop's multi-page document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Atril
The MATE desktop's multi-page document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Atril.
Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux.
Evince is GNOME's GPL document viewer for PDF and PostScript on Linux, fitting the GNOME desktop instead of MATE, and likewise offers no PDF editing.
Xreader
Linux Mint's document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comic book files.
Xreader is Linux Mint's viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics, actively maintained by the Mint team for GTK desktops.
Okular
Universal document viewer for PDF, EPUB, comics, DjVu and more.
Okular runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, opens EPUB, comics and DjVu, and adds annotations stored separately, but pulls in KDE libraries on non-KDE desktops.
Papers
A GNOME document viewer for reading, searching and annotating PDFs, DjVu, TIFF and comics.
Papers is an actively maintained GNOME viewer for Linux that adds PDF annotation and highlighting and an adaptive interface for small screens.
qpdfview
A tabbed Qt document viewer for PDF, PostScript and DjVu files.
qpdfview adds tabs for several documents and SyncTeX support for LaTeX, but covers only PDF, PostScript and DjVu.
zathura
A minimal, keyboard-driven document viewer with plugin support for PDF, PostScript and DjVu.
zathura is a minimal keyboard-driven Linux viewer with vim-like keys, plugins for PDF, PostScript and DjVu, and SyncTeX, configured through text files.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
MuPDF is a very fast AGPL viewer on desktop and mobile with a minimal keyboard-driven interface and the bundled mutool for scripted PDF manipulation.
Sioyek
A PDF reader built for textbooks and research papers, with keyboard control and quick jumps to figures and references.
Sioyek is built for papers and textbooks, with overlays for figures and references and keyboard control, and also runs on Windows and macOS.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Atril as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
DjVuLibre
An open-source DjVu implementation with a viewer and command-line tools for scanned documents.
Atril is the MATE desktop's lightweight viewer for DjVu, PDF, PostScript and comic archives, offering text search and bookmarks but no DjVu encoding tools.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
PDF Arranger
Drag PDF pages into the order you want, rotate them, crop them, and merge two files together.
PDF Mix Tool
A lightweight open-source Linux app for merging, splitting, rotating and rearranging PDF pages.
Xournal++
Handwritten notes and PDF annotation with a stylus, including on top of lecture slides and scanned papers.
