jfbview is a PDF and image viewer for the Linux framebuffer. Features include:

• Zoom and rotation
• Table of Contents (TOC) viewer
• Interactive text search

The home page of jfbview is at https://github.com/jichu4n/jfbview.

Screenshots

Scroll & zoom

Table of contents

Search

Installation

Arch Linux / Manjaro

Install package jfbview from the AUR, e.g.

yay -S jfbview

Source: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jfbview

Debian / Ubuntu

See Releases for pre-built .deb packages for the following environments:

• Debian 13 "trixie": amd64, i386, arm64 (ARMv8), armhf (ARMv7)
• Debian 12 "bookworm": amd64, i386, arm64, armhf
• Debian 11 "bullseye": amd64, i386, arm64, armhf
• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble: amd64
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy: amd64

To build from source, fetch the source code along with transitive dependencies as described in the Source code section below, then see packaging/build-package-deb.sh.

Fedora

See Releases for pre-built .rpm packages for the following environments:

• Fedora 43: x86_64, aarch64 (ARMv8)
• Fedora 42: x86_64, aarch64

To build from source, fetch the source code along with transitive dependencies as described in the Source code section below, then see packaging/build-package-rpm.sh.

Installing from source

Dependencies

• NCURSES

• libjpeg or libjpeg-turbo

• OpenJPEG / openjp2

• FreeType

• HarfBuzz

• zlib

Build-time dependencies:

• C++ compiler with support for C++14 (GCC 4.9+, Clang 3.5+)

• CMake 3.3+

Source code

To fetch the source code along with all transitive dependencies with git:

git clone https://github.com/jichu4n/jfbview.git
cd jfbview
git submodule update --init --recursive

Alternatively, see Releases for full source code archives including all transitive dependencies (jfbview-<VERSION>-full-source.zip).

Build & install

cmake -H. -Bbuild
cd build
make
make install

Documentation

See jfbview man page.

About

jfbview is written by Chuan Ji, and is distributed under the Apache License v2.

History

jfbview started as a fork of FBPDF by Ali Gholami Rudi with improvements and bug fixes, and was named JFBPDF. The JFBPDF code (in C) grew steadily more convoluted as features were added, and finally was completely rewritten from scratch in November 2012, with added support for images through Imlib2.