PDF Readers

The Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular (if strongly criticized) document format standard. One problem is the bald assertion of many sites providing material in PDF that "you must use Adobe Acrobat Reader" to access the material. This is simply untrue (however popular a misconception it might be — Google shows over 8,060,000 results for this term).

There are several applications you can use other than Adobe's own proprietary products for PDFs. This is meant to be a list of such alternatives.

Notes:

The usual "old reliables" are xpdf and gv, though users of GNOME or KDE might prefer project-oriented PDF viewers (Evince, Okular).

Readers

Program Platform GUI Console (text-only)? Free Software? Notes
xpdf Unix, Win w/X11 Yes Yes Yes An open source GUI viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Requires: lesstif2, libpoppler.
Evince Unix, Win w/X11 Yes No Yes GNOME viewer for PDF, PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript, DJVU, and DVI files. Supports searching for text, copying text to the clipboard, hypertext navigation, and table-of-contents bookmarks. Requires: gconf2, gnome-icon-theme, libatk1.0, libcairo2, libdbus, libdjvulibre21, libevince3, libfontconfig1, libfreetype6, libgail18, libgtk-pixbuf2.0, libglade2, libglib2.0, libgnome-keyring0, libgtk2.0, libice6, libnautilus-extension1, libpango1.0, libpoppler-glib4, libsm6, libspectre1, libtiff4, libxml2, shared-mime-info, zlib1g.
Okular Unix, Win w/X11 Yes No Yes KDE 4.x PDF viewer, based on xpdf, bundled into the kdegraphics collection. Requires: libkdecore5, libkdeui5, libkio5, libkparts4, libjpeg8, libfreetype6, libkprintutils4, libkpty4, libkutils4, libokularcore1, libphonon4, libpoppler-qt4, libqca2, libqimageblitz4, libqt4, libqtcore4, libqt4-svg, libtq4-dbus, libqt4-xml, libqtgui4, libspectre1, libstreamanalyzer0, phonon, zlib1g
GNU gv Unix Yes No Yes Ghostscript-based viewer for X11. Far better paging than most of the PDF-specific viewers, but lacks search, hyperlink, and thumbnail features. Based on Timothy O. Theisen's Ghostview, and a further development of Johannes Plass's initial gv implementation.
ePDFView Unix Yes No Yes Lightweight PDF viewer for X11 based on Poppler and gtk+.
Ghostscript, ghostview, GSview Unix, Win Yes No Yes/No (GPL and AFPL) These are an interpreter and two viewers. Specifically supporting legacy MS Windows in native versions.
Gpdf Unix Yes No Yes GNOME PDF viewer, based on xpdf. EOLed in 2005, when it was rewritten and re-released as Evince. Old (deprecated).
KPDF Unix Yes No Yes KDE 3.x PDF viewer, based on xpdf, bundled into the kdegraphics collection. Requires: kdelibs4, libfreetype6, libqt3, libxft2, libpaper1.
kghostview Unix Yes No Yes KDE 3.x PDF viewer, based on Timothy O. Theisen's Ghostview, bundled into the kdegraphics collection. Requires: kdelibs4, ghostscript, libqt3.
pdftotext (1,2) Unix, Win No Yes Yes A command-line utility to extract ASCII plaintext from PDF files. There are two implementations of pdftotext. The older one is part of xpdf. This is being widely replaced by the newer (re-)implementation, part of the Poppler project suite (often packaged as poppler-utils). Full text search (through your pager), no hypertext or thumbnails.
Vindaloo Unix Yes No Yes Vindaloo is a PDF viewer for GNUstep.
ViewPDF Unix, Win w/X11 Yes No Yes ViewPDF was a PDF viewer for GNUstep. Controls and operation were awkward. It was replaced by Vindaloo.
GGv Unix Yes No Yes GNOME Ghostview (GGv, gnome-gv) was a PDF/PostScript document viewer with hooks to gconf, bonobo, Nautilus, etc. It was developed as a GNU package, and has long been decomissioned.
Foxit Reader Unix, Win, OSX, others Yes No No Proprietary PDF reader with support for navigation, bookmarks, etc.
Adobe Acrobat Reader Unix, Win, OSX Yes No No Proprietary PDF reader with support for navigation, bookmarks, etc. Has a built-in JavaScript interpreter (which can be disabled in program preferences).

As for why you'd care for one of alternatives to Adobe's own offering, there are three general reasons:



[RM comments: It's worth also reading LWN.net's 2004 "Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers", http://lwn.net/Articles/113094/, and also http://www.pdfconverter.com/resources/using-pdf-in-linux#C2.]

To add: