Google on Friday announced that they have added support for 12 new file formats in the Google Docs Viewer. Support for all file formats mentioned above have been added plus support for Apple Pages .pages, Adobe Illustrator .ai, Autodesk AutoCad .dxf, Scalable Vector Graphics .svg, Postscript .eps and .ps, TrueType .ttf and XMP Paper Specification .xps.

What does it mean for users of the service? First, all major Microsoft Office 2010 formats are now supported by Google Doc Viewer. Supported are both Microsoft Word (doc and docx), Microsoft Excel (xls and xlsx) and Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt and pptx) formats which can now be viewed online.

As usual, support for new formats has an impact on other Google services that make use of the Google Docs Viewer. Google’s email service Gmail for instance now offers a View link for those newly supported formats so that they can be viewed directly online without need for a desktop software supporting the file format.

The new file format can also be uploaded and shared directly in Google Docs. Google Docs Viewer is accessible right here. It can be used directly to view a document that is located on the Internet. Just paste the url of the document into the form and click the Generate link button for options to view the document online.

In this review I am going to highlight four different viewers: ePDFViewer, Evince, Okular, and XPDF. Each of these tools offers a different take on the same task. You may decide to drop Acrobat Reader for one of these, or you may go scrambling back to what most would call the Industry Standard.

ePDFViewer

Figure 1

ePDFViewer is a lightweight viewer that uses the GTK+ and Poppler libraries. Effectively, ePDFViewer is a clone of Evince, minus the GNOME libraries. The latter fact is nice, because it makes ePDFViewer much more portable than Evince. And because it shares a somewhat similar interface with Evince, it is quite simple to use. The biggest problem with ePDFViewer is that it is almost too stripped down.

As you can see (In Figure 1) I am viewing a collection of Ghacks Linux articles in PDF format. If I open that same collection up in, say, Evince I will see a sidebar containing a thumbnail index of the pages in that document. If I open up the Index in ePDFViewer I get nothing. So in order to find a particular page in ePDFViewer you have to start scrolling until you find the page you are looking for.

Evince

Figure 2

Evince is the default document viewer for the GNOME desktop, and with good reason. Although not nearly as robust and feature-rich as Acrobat Reader, Evince is clean, stable, is perfectly integrated with the desktop, and doesn’t require any work to get printing to function properly.

As you can see, in Figure 2, Evince automatically opens the index for your document so finding a particular page is simple. And whereas ePDFViewer is only a PDF viewer, Evince can handle the following document types:

• PDF
• Postscript
• djvu
• tiff
• dvi

There is also optional support for other document types as well as planned support for MS Powerpoint documents and many other formats. Unfortunately Evince does not have any of the more power-user options offered by Acrobat Reader. But for pure PDF viewing, Evince is a solid entry.

Okular

Figure 3

Okular is to KDE what Evince is to GNOME. But Okular takes PDF viewing to a few newer heights on the Linux desktop. Not only can you view your PDF documents, you can:

• Copy selections to the clipboard, which can then be pasted into other documents.
• Add bookmarks to documents.
• Zoom specific areas of a document.
• Annotate your PDF documents.

Although I am fond of the simplicity of Evince, Okular is the far superior PDF viewer for the Linux desktop. It offers many of the power-user features offered by Acrobat Reader, without having the instability issues.

XPDF

Figure 4

Now we’re going back in time, back to the days when X11 was in its Linux infancy and the desktop Widgets were more UNIX-like than Windows-like. For those who have never experienced old-school Linux or UNIX, XPDF is a different beast all together. Although XPDF’s lack of a modern interface will take you by surprise, the stability shouldn’t. The biggest problem most will have with XPDF is getting used to the interface. When XPDF first opens you will have what looks like a typical, old-school X11 Window with no obvious means of working with a document (save for the navigation toolbar at the bottom.) In order to open a document you have to right click an empty spot in the main window, which will reveal a menu that allows you to open and manipulate your document.

Final thoughts

If I had to choose which of these tools was best suited for use as modern PDF viewer I would, without hesitation, select Okular. Not only is Okular as stable as the other offerings, it offers far more features which allows it to compete (and in many ways defeat) Acrobat Reader.

Universal Viewer is another application that will suite many more needs. It has not only been designed to open document formats but also other formats like images and photos, multimedia files like videos or audio and Internet files like htm or xml. The program is driven by plugins that add support for various file types. The plugins are the same that are used by Total Commander which ensures the availability of many plugins for various file formats.

Universal Viewer is a viewer that displays the information in a basic but highly accessible fashion. Only the main information are shown without additional formatting. Take a look at a comparison between the same document in Microsoft Word 2007 and Universal Viewer:

Universal Viewer is therefor a basic viewer that can display pretty much any format that can be displayed visually. It comes with the following feature set:

• Full support for Unicode filenames
• Built-in functions of several popular plugins: images, multimedia, webpages view
• Support for multiple codepages: ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ISO, KOI8, Mac etc.
• Toolbar, status bar, other interface improvements
• Auto-reloading of file on changing, “Follow tail” option
• Displaying of line numbers
• Displaying of non-printable characters
• Combined Unicode/Hex mode (call Unicode mode twice)
• More modern RegEx search library
• Print preview
• EXIF viewer

Some of the more commonly used plugins, for example to display Microsoft Office 2007 documents are linked from the developers homepage directly while others can be found on Total Commander plugin websites which are also linked there. Plugins can be added directly from within Universal Viewer.

Universal Viewer itself can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. The developer offers a Pro version of the viewer as well which adds several new features to the application.

Verdict:

Universal Viewer is a fast and lightweight document viewer that can be used to quickly look at the contents of virtually any files on the computer system.

TextMaker Viewer 2009 is a free document viewer that supports a wide range of different document formats. It basically combines the supported formats of Microsoft Office 2007 with those of Open Office in a fast loading interface.

Supported are the following formats in the latest version of TextMaker Viewer:

• .docx, .docm Microsoft Word 2007
• .sxw OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Text
• .dotx, .dotm Microsoft Word 2007 templates
• .rtf Rich Text Format
• .doc Microsoft Word 6.0 up to Word 2007
• .psw Pocket Word (Pocket PC)
• .dot Microsoft Word templates 6.0 up to 2007
• .pwd Pocket Word (Handheld PC)
• .tmd TextMaker 6.0 up to 2008
• .htm/html HTML documents
• .odt OpenDocument Text
• .txt Text files (DOS, Windows, Unicode, UTF-8)

The document viewer comes with a few additional features like zooming in or out of the document or viewing it in full screen. Documents can also be printed on the local computer system. A little bit annoying is the “nag” screen at the beginning that can be used to enter registration information. Users have to press skip to continue. It will not appear as long as they keep the document viewer open.

Are you using a specific program to view documents? If so let us know in the comments.

Now seriously. Have you ever received a document (a clean one) with an extension you never heard of and didn’t even know what application you were supposed to use to open it? That’s not a problem any more due to applications and online services that can understand varied file formats and display the contents of those files for you. Of course, you can’t edit such files with viewers because their only purpose is to display the contents of the document. But hey, better that nothing, ain’t it…

Let me introduce 2 ways of viewing contents of a document with an unknown extension:

1) Install a single program to rule all the document extensions you can ever happen to meet (alright, maybe not absolutely all of them but pretty much most of the common ones). I’ve tried a freeware tool called TextMaker Viewer and it does it’s job well. It’s a simple document viewer without useless functions but it has everything needed to fulfil it’s purpose. It supports 10 of the most common file formats which should be quite enough for average use. According to the coders, Linux version is under development.

2) Don’t install anything while keeping the possibility to view common file types through your browser. Zoho Viewer is an online service that does just that. You can either choose a file from your local computer to be displayed or enter URL of an online document you’d like to read. You can even print the document or obtain a code allowing you to embed it somewhere else on the web. No annoying ads, clean interface, 15 file types supported.

The advantage of the second method is that you do not have to execute the file to view its contents.