[3] The developers of Evince intended to replace the multiple GNOME document viewers with a single and simple application.

The Evince motto sums up the project aim: "Simply a Document Viewer".

Evince is free and open-source software subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

[4] Evince began as a rewrite of GPdf,[5] which its support programmers had started to find unwieldy to maintain.

[11] Evince can show two pages at a time, left and right, and offers full-screen and slide-show views.