Okular For Linux

Document viewers may seem out of place in today's world where our OSes and browsers come well-equipped to read all sorts of formats right out of the box.

However, as Adobe Acrobat Reader continues to show (even though AAR is also a document editor) that as long as we have documents, there will always be a place for apps of this sort.

Okular is one such app, a universal document viewer developed by KDE, the international free/open-source software community that developed and maintains the Plasma Desktop, Krita, and digiKam, alongside a plethora of other Linux-related frameworks.

It works on some of the most popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, KDE Neon, CentOS, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Manjaro, Elementary OS, Kubuntu, Linux MInt, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and Arch Linux.

The first impression upon laying your eyes on Okular is that it's definitely old-looking. Granted, even though it won't win any beauty awards anytime soon, the app does its job rather well.

For starters, Okular supports the following formats: PDF, PS, TIFF, CHM, DjVu, DVI, XPS, ODT, EPUB, and can even read a wide range of image formats, as well as eBooks and comic books.

The format support alone should be enough to recommend Okular as a versatile app. The GUI may be old, but it does a decent job of providing quick access to all the app's features.

The left side of the main window is home to the sidebar (useful when dealing with bulky documents with lots of contents), an separate sections for thumbnails, reviews, and books. Last but not least, the app also comes with annotation support.

Okular won't impress most people at first glance. However, if you happen to need a document viewer, and you don't want to pay for it, then Okular, with its surprising amount of features and its outdated GUI, will definitely come in handy.