GNU gv (pdf/postscript graphical viewer)

It's stupid but there is an option "fit to window" :-) and the pdf will be in full screen mode.

You can start in full screen mode. No distraction and you are focused on your pdf document.

gv -fullscreen yourpdf.pdf &

And click on Fit width to window. But it's a personal taste ;-)

Also try MuPDF (a PDF (and other document formats) library that comes with a barebones viewer). In my experience it seems to work better than Poppler, the library that most GNU/Linux PDF viewers use.

Wow, nice and ugly. I like it.

Mupdf is nice too. gv looks beautiful on a big screen. It use ghostscript and you can looks your pdf on the command line with ghostscript but I don't really now how to use it properly. A nice thing is that it come from the GNU project.

I'm tacking another approach that is nice too. Use "pdftotext" to read the file in emacs, on a tty.

$ pdftotext my_pdf.pdf

I use a 12,5" laptop. I don't care about graphics.

If you don't open your pdf files with the root account it should be have no problems. It is not a closed format, I think you can inspect them. The worse will be damage with your user session. Pdf viewers are like web browser, they interpret commands. If the pdf file is not evil, it should have no problems.

gv is ugly ;-) but it's wonderful on a 4k display.