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Okular - image, ebook, pdf reader

Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2022 7:02 pm
by webfork
For my purposes, the program is a remarkably strong open source PDF viewer, but it calls itself a "Universal Document Viewer." The tabbed interface lets you view, annotate, rotate, text-to-voice, and select various text structures (table and area select). There's also a document dark mode via several different color inversion settings.

Note that apart from the image addendums, this is not an open source PDF editor -- you'd want to look into LibreOffice Draw for that.

Standout features
  • Very customizable
  • Open source and multi-platform (Linux and Windows)
  • Wide format support, including ePub, images, markdown, comics (both cbz and cb7), and may more.
  • Quick and responsive (notable as a lot of PDF tools that I test are not)
  • Opens even the latest format password-protected PDF files
Wishlist
  • Dark or gray skin for the interface
  • For the voice-to-text bit, I'd like to have the play/pause visible in the interface (right now it's under a menu item) and highlight the words as they're being read. I know that sounds specific but it's fantastically useful when you're trying to learn new material from a PDF.
  • Export to other formats, e.g. move a PDF file into TIFF
  • Support for secure image archives
  • AVIF image support
Steps:
  1. Download 7z file from https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Okul ... ase_win64/ (I downloaded okular-21.12.3-965-windows-msvc2019_64-cl.7z) and decompress
  2. Launch bin\Okular.exe
Status: Not portable Writes to appdata\local\okular ... tested version 21.12.3

Resources: 50 megs ram, 346 megs disk space. Still a lot less than the Adobe PDF editor. Low CPU usage.

Webpages

https://okular.kde.org/
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-to ... ular.shtml

Image

Re: Okular - image, ebook, pdf reader

Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2022 8:16 am
by webfork
Note about Okular as an ebook viewer: I'd probably use the (also not portable) Koodo viewer.

--

I initially posted this as a PDF viewer and annotator, but I've been looking for a ePub viewer for a while now. That's what brought me to download this in the first place.

Unfortunately document readability with ePub isn't much better than my existing tools. Needs some configuration options including font and margin edits. Example of some of the font oddities below (key bits underlined):
  • Image

Re: Okular - image, ebook, pdf reader

Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 8:48 pm
by webfork
UPDATE: v22.04 now available with lots of bugfixes
https://okular.kde.org/news/

Re: Okular - image, ebook, pdf reader

Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2023 7:14 pm
by webfork
Interesting news: the most recent version of GPG4win integrated Okular:
The GnuPG Edition of Okular is optimized to be lightweight and to provide as little attack surface as possible. It does not support any active content like JavaScript or media files in PDF documents. It should therefore be more suitable in high security environments than other PDF readers.
https://www.gpg4win.de/version4.2.html

I don't expect any of this is portable but still nice to see work on a secure document reader. The current install is experimental and shouldn't be used for anything that's system-critical.

Re: Okular - image, ebook, pdf reader

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 6:32 pm
by webfork
Update: Now at v.22.08.0 ... changelog: https://kde.org/announcements/changelog ... .0/#okular

I also retested the program. Unfortunately no change in portability.