Alternatives to qpdfview
A tabbed Qt document viewer for PDF, PostScript and DjVu files. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
qpdfview
A tabbed Qt document viewer for PDF, PostScript and DjVu files.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as qpdfview.
Okular
Universal document viewer for PDF, EPUB, comics, DjVu and more.
Okular opens a wider range of formats including EPUB and comics and runs on Windows and macOS too, but pulls in KDE libraries on non-KDE desktops.
zathura
A minimal, keyboard-driven document viewer with plugin support for PDF, PostScript and DjVu.
zathura is a keyboard-driven Linux viewer with vim-like keys and SyncTeX support, configured through text files instead of a settings window and without tabs.
Evince
GNOME's lightweight document viewer for PDF, PostScript and other document formats on Linux.
Evince is GNOME's simple Linux document viewer for PDF and PostScript, with an interface that fits GNOME rather than qpdfview's configurable tabbed Qt layout.
Xreader
Linux Mint's document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comic book files.
Xreader is Linux Mint's actively maintained GTK viewer that also opens XPS and comic archives, whereas qpdfview has a slow release cadence.
Atril
The MATE desktop's multi-page document viewer for PDF, PostScript, DjVu, XPS and comics.
Atril is the MATE desktop's lightweight viewer that adds DVI, XPS and comic archive support, with a traditional interface and no SyncTeX mentioned.
Papers
A GNOME document viewer for reading, searching and annotating PDFs, DjVu, TIFF and comics.
Papers is an actively maintained GNOME viewer with PDF annotation and highlighting, plus TIFF and comic support and an adaptive interface for small screens.
Sioyek
A PDF reader built for textbooks and research papers, with keyboard control and quick jumps to figures and references.
Sioyek is a keyboard-driven reader for papers and textbooks on Windows, macOS and Linux, with figure and reference overlays and LaTeX forward and inverse search.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
MuPDF is a very fast, minimal cross-platform viewer that also reads XPS and ships the mutool command-line toolkit, under the AGPL-3.0 license.
Also worth comparing
These listings name qpdfview 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.
qpdfview is a tabbed Qt viewer for DjVu, PDF and PostScript on Linux, with SyncTeX support, but it has no command-line DjVu utilities.
PDF Tools
Emacs package for viewing, searching and annotating PDF files inside the editor.
qpdfview is a tabbed Qt viewer on Linux with SyncTeX support for LaTeX, running as its own app with only rudimentary annotation.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Skim
macOS PDF reader and annotator built for reading papers.
Sumatra PDF
A small, fast, open-source reader for PDF, EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, DjVu and other documents on Windows.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML.
