when opening a particular pdf file, evince decides to open it in "presentation mode".
I see in the man page that evince has -s option to open in presentation mode, but I did not invoke it. I am simply opening all pdfs as evince file.pdf
Somehow evince has decided on its own, to open this particular kind of pdf in presentation mode.
Other pdfs open just fine in normal window.
How can I disable this behavior?
Following dodrg's answer you should edit the PDF metadata to change the PageMode field. Different values are accepted (source):
UseNone: When a document is opened in the viewer, it shows only pages (Bookmarks, Attachments, Page Thumbnails, and Layers panels are hidden).
UseOutlines: When a document is opened in the viewer, it shows pages and opens the Bookmarks panel to display outlines (bookmarks).
UseThumbs: When a document is opened in the viewer, it shows pages and opens the Page Thumbnails panel to display thumbnails.
FullScreen: When a document is opened in the viewer, it shows pages in full screen mode (no menu bar, window controls, or any other window is visible).
UseOC: When a document is opened, for example, in the Adobe Acrobat Reader, the Reader shows pages and opens the optional content group panel (the Layers panel).
UseAttachments: When a document is opened in the viewer, it shows pages and opens the Attachments panel to display attachments.
Various tools are available to edit PDF metadata like pdftk, exiftool, and qpdf. But from testing, it looks like only pdftk can actually add information to this metadata field.
To modify this metadata field, you may use the command
pdftk file.pdf update_info info.txt output output.pdf
where info.txt contains
PageMode: UseNone
Somehow evince has decided on its own, to open this particular kind of pdf in this idiotic mode.
The "decision" is due to a PDF feature:
/PageMode /FullScreen
You may wish to permanently disable it in the PDF itself by replacing it with
/PageMode /UseNone
... filling with 3 spaces at the end to keep filesize.
Note that evince stores the last presentation mode of a file so you might have to switch the previously viewed PDF to windowed mode first.
Very useful for frequently used PDFs. But for this question its only a workaround.
An example for how to patch:
sed -zE 's|(<<[^>]*/PageMode\s*)/FullScreen|\1/UseNone |' Your.PDF > YourPatched.PDF
I would not do -i inplace as this search string is not fully failsafe for all thinkable cases.
/PageMode /FullScreen. But what do you mean by "filling with 3 spaces at the end to keep filesize" ? And can I tell evince to ignore this feature entirely, and always open in normal mode ?
Commented
Aug 19, 2023 at 10:06
/PagaMode in the code of the PDF and patch it directly. No need to repackage the whole thing with the chance to change arbitrary other details. The three spaces probably aren't necessary as a PDF is not a classical binary, but it can contain some code so just for safety and it doesn't hurt... — I updated the answer by an example that would patch such a file.
fullscreen and presentation. These are applied to the PDF's Gnome Metadata at PDF usage & attribute selection: gio info file.pdf. — Unfortunately setting gio set metadata::evince::fullscreen 0 will be overridden by the internal properties of the PDF. // If you eliminate the PDF-property /PageMode instead to change the setting, then the gio metadata take effect. But they set only non-defaults and 400thecat just requests the defaut