MuPDF

I need to read a [PDF] 1 document from time to time. Over the last 12 years, I’ve tried many PDF viewers and they all disappointed somehow:

acroread
Proprietary software, buggy, slow
xpdf
Ugly fonts, awkward to use, slowish, and no-longer maintained
ghostscript + gv
Ugly fonts, awkward to use, feels old
ePdfViewer
awkward to use and slow
evince
I don’t want to install Gnome for a PDF viewer, and it’s slow

About a month ago I tried [MuPDF] 2. According to its website:

[MuPDF] 2 is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C.

And that’s exactly what it is! MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer that’s really lightweight and fast. It uses the keyboard, and it’s intuitive to use. I would like to be able to copy/paste some text out of a document, but that’s not implemented yet Update: It turns out that mupdf can copy text out of a document, just right-click on a chunk of, box it, and press enter. I love MuPDF. I still growl when I see a PDF, but at least it eases the pain.

If my writing sparked any ideas, questions, or insights, I would love to hear from you.
Email me at henry@precheur.org I read and respond to each email.