How can I open multiple instances of the same document in Evince?

Evince opens new documents in the existing window. I'd like to see many pages of a PDF file at the same time.

For example, say I'm reading a paper in one instance of Evince on page 3 and I want another instance of Evince to be on the page with references, page 27.

> evince 1.pdf&

opens an Evince window containing 1.pdf, but then

> evince 1.pdf&

does nothing. I have a total of one Evince window.

I would like to have two windows, each displaying 1.pdf. How can I achieve this?


Open the file then from menu:

File -> Open a Copy

I've voted for CYrus's answer, which I think is probably best for most users. If you really want to do it from the command line, I suppose there's always a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
PDFNAME="$1"
TEMPNAME="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)"
cp "$PDFNAME" "$TEMPNAME"
evince "$TEMPNAME"
rm "$TEMPNAME"

  • Copy the original PDF file,
  • Save the copy in the same location or desktop, give a different name.
  • Then you can open the both files without going through all the troubles of configuring the path's.