Comment 15 for bug 307459

>hmm, did you run make install after updating evince?

Yes; I made a testing directory and built everything with the prefix pointing to that directory, then installed the packages. (I had to install cairo to build poppler, since poppler needs a newer version of cairo than Intrepid ships, and I had to install poppler to build evince.) I verified that the new copy of evince was using the libs I'd built before it:

$ ldd /tmp/evince-test/inst/bin/evince|egrep '(cairo|poppler)'
 libpoppler-glib.so.4 => /tmp/evince-test/inst/lib/libpoppler-glib.so.4 (0xb7a13000)
 libpoppler.so.4 => /tmp/evince-test/inst/lib/libpoppler.so.4 (0xb7856000)
 libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0xb7614000)
 libcairo.so.2 => /tmp/evince-test/inst/lib/libcairo.so.2 (0xb74e6000)

And I executed it by explicitly invoking it.

$ dpkg -l evince
ii evince 2.24.1-0ubuntu1 Document (postscript, pdf) viewer
$ /tmp/evince-test/inst/bin/evince --version
GNOME Document Viewer 2.25.91

The "Help->About" dialog also reports the newer version. Is this system working on your system? Perhaps there's another library I'd need to build to get it working, though I'm skeptical of that.