Recently, Ubuntu-Mate (UM) has adopted the inclusion of more and more programs from the Gnome ecosystem. For instance, the Gnome-Maps (something I have never ever used) has been included in the 22.04.
Pdf readers, on the other hand, are vital for those who deal with texts, as I (and I'm sure many of the users) do. Now, I'd want to share a reflection I had based on a reoccurring tendency I've had since returning to UM.
Atril is the Mate desktop's default PDF viewer, and it has been regularly updated and refined, although there are two major issues:
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Annotations. Because Atril is a fork of Evince, it can open and (with some effort) insert annotations. However, it is insufficient. Reviewers at peer-reviewed journals, for example, frequently return manuscripts to the author. I just received one such commented document, and despite Atril's regular ability, it did not open the comments. To access the comments, I had to install Evince. This inability was undoubtedly caused by the pdf reader used by the editor, but I still had to rely on Evince to read it. If Evince is capable, why wasn't Atril?
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Text highlighting. If you stick with Atril, there is no highlighting, and by the looks of it, we shouldn't expect it to have any time soon. If you want to highlight text, you'll need to use another reader. If that's the case, why not get rid of Atril right away?
Then I wonder, why not ditch Atril in favor of Evince? I decided to bring this topic up since I believe this community listens to their users more than any other I've encountered. If you, like me, use a pdf reader for your everyday job and believe that Atril falls short, you will undoubtedly choose Evince as a superior replacement for a pdf reader in future editions of UM.
