brent As of the evince issue, this might simply be a pdf file integrity issue. I have several pdf files from different sources that lead to evince needing at least 10 seconds to load them. Some of them I checked for integrity here.
With the following result:
Compliance pdfa-1a
Result Document does not conform to PDF/A.
Details
Validating file "Anlage-0.pdf" for conformance level pdfa-1a
The schema description for namespace 'pdfx:' (http://ns.adobe.com/pdfx/1.3/) is missing.
The key StructTreeRoot is required but missing.
The document does not conform to the requested standard.
The document's meta data is either missing or inconsistent or corrupt.
The document doesn't provide appropriate logical structure information.
The document does not conform to the PDF/A-1a standard.
So, evince issue might therefore only affect currupted PDF's.
Zathura by the way opens theses files without a problem.