Update: As mentioned in the comments, qpdfview solves the problem.
While I wrote my bachelors thesis a couple of months ago, I really got angry about Evince and the lack of a tab-enabled PDF viewer in Gnome. While I was (trying to) learn for a university course today, this anger returned. The lecturer felt like it was a good idea to arrange the content in more than 15 PDF files.
I ceased the attempt to learn and again started a search for a tabbed document viewer for Gnome. Several users requested a tab feature in evince on Ubuntu brainstorm and received - in my opinion - annoyingly arrogant answers. The technical aspects are not an argument, look at Gedit. The design-user-experience-blah reasons for not implementing this feature may be justified, but one could still implement it as an option and let the user decide. But whatever…
I did not exactly find a tabbed document viewer. But I found an acceptable workaround:
It is based on whatever browser you like (as long as it is supported by mozplugger, Chromium in my case) and embedding evince there. On Ubuntu mozplugger can be installed like so:
sudo aptitude install mozplugger
After you installed mozplugger and restarted your browser it should show up as a plugin. You can then follow the instructions in the blog post linked to above.
Because Evince has no option to hide the toolbar persistently, I removed it completely.
To do this, edit ~/.gnome2/evince/evince_toolbar.xml to look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<toolbars version="1.0">
</toolbars>
I have furthermore configured Gnome to open PDFs in Chromium.
