Document Viewer (Evince) history navigation

Question

I am satisfied with basic functionality of Evince (3.4.0 on Ubuntu 12.04). Unfortunately in this viewer I am really missing history navigation i.e. possibility to go back to previous views and optionally go forward in the viewing history like most of the web browsers have Alt+← and Alt+→. I think this function is very important when using hyperlinks and searching during browsing.

For Evince I did not find this function on the standard keyboard shortcuts, in the menu, in the documentation.

Does Evince have this function and how can it be used?

Which other PDF viewers maintained for Ubuntu have this function?

Answer 1

As of Evince 3.32, the key bindings are Alt + P and Alt + N. I cannot find the toolbar button anymore.

Reference: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/770

Answer 2

Under Evince 3.4 you can activate a "back" button by editing the toolbar (Edit → Toolbar; drag and drop functions to toolbar):

I don't think there's any hotkey by default but you might be able to add a custom one.

If you're looking for customization you might be better off with a PDF viewer like Okular or qpdfview anyway. Both should offer the function you're searching for.

Answer 3

Ubuntu 20.10

Things have flipped around now, it's so much fun:

• Evince 3.38 history is working fine, notably with the Alt+P/Alt+N shortcuts (but I discovered that their header only search is useless: How to find/search for text results only in the Outline/headers in PDFs open in Evince? so I still can't use it daily)
• Okular 20.08 history is completely broke with Alt+Shift+Left/Right, possibly: https://www.mail-archive.com/kde-bugs-dist@kde.org/msg489269.html

I'll still go crazy one of these days.

I've made a minimal test file for this now: https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/multipage_refs/multipage_refs.pdf

Annoying Evince history bugs

These have haunted me for years, including Ubuntu 18.04, Evince 3.28.2, and make the history jump back feature unusable for the technical documents I read all day:

• the history jump does not jump to the expected location of a sane human:

  • https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/399
  • https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/558
  • https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/810

• there was no default (Alt+Left) shortcut / it is not documented / I don't have the patience to find out how to create it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/770

  Tha bug was fixed in Evince 3.32 as mentioned at: https://askubuntu.com/a/1150128/52975 and as of 3.34.1-1 I have a "Keyboard Shortcuts" menu entry that shows "Alt + P" and "Alt +N" as the shortcuts.

  However, possibly due to the aforementioned history bugs, the feature is still useless to me, e.g. if I visit https://static.docs.arm.com/ddi0487/fa/DDI0487F_a_armv8_arm.pdf and click a table of contents link, Alt + P does nothing instead of jumping back to the table of contents as expected.

You should go and upvote them.

Best solution I've found for Ubuntu 20.04

Use Okular. It has a default jump at Alt + Shift + Left/Right, and other key features like searching in the Table of Contents (or at least has them in a place I can easily find).

Best solution I've found for Ubuntu 18.04

Use Firefox!: What PDF viewers are available for Ubuntu? Okular was buggy there too, I forgot why now.

Answer 4

I prefer the xpdf viewer for this reason. It has history navigation and is quite lightweight and rapid. It is available for ~any system running X11.

Answer 5

At present (Ubuntu 18.04; Linuxmint 19.1) Xreader (version 2.0.2) offers functionality go back and forward in the viewing history.