Ask HN: What PDF viewer do you use?
I am a mathematician currently doing my PhD. I am working on a mac and have become a bit frustrated with preview as a PDF viewer. What good (and preferably free) viewer do you recommend?
For Linux, xpdf in all its Athena Xt marvelousness is still a good basic reader with a small footprint and good keybindings.
Where it's not sufficient, I'm turning to Zathura (from Suckless) by preference, otherwise Okular (KDE).
On OSX, Preview seems tolerably good.
I frequently read (or process) PDFs in the terminal. Popplar libraries / tools are excellent for this, including pdfinfo and pdftotext. The latter's been extended to provide a PDF viewer as a Bash function:
pdfless ()
{
pdftotext -layout "$1" - |
sed 's/\f/\n\n ----------------- ----------------- <page> ----------------- ----------------- \n\n\n/g' |
${PAGER:-less} -S
}
On tablets, I've found the Onyx BOOX Neorader (a multi-format e-book reader_ quite good, though I've also used FBReader, PocketBook, and KOreader (the latter is praised by heavy users, I've found it confusing and unintuitive in occasional encounters).
I've used the FoxIt PDF reader, though not in years, probably a decade.
Haven't touched Adobe in something close to 20 years, possibly longer.
SumatraPDF supports lots of formats, super convenient and lightweight: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
It's made for reading technical books/papers and has quite a quiver of functionality supporting exactly that. Was discussed on HN twice already, last thread can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395649
I've since switched to qpdfview, but zooming and panning feels sluggish. I noticed that a lot of PDF viewers have distinct "modes" and switching between them seems never obvious. Zoom mode, text-selection mode.
The main annoyance I have with Preview is that some of the settings are global. I usually have many PDFs open at the same time and you can't hide the sidebar / show chapters for just one PDF, it always changes for all of them. Also there are not tabs. There is no easy way to jump back and forth between two pages that might be far apart. And I wish I could peek links to other places in the same PDF.
It’s more of a PDF editor / annotator than viewer but it may suit your needs nonetheless:
You can open multiple multiple tabs in your browser to view the same PDF at different chapters for example
Some additional details:
- entirely free
- everything happens locally in your browser: the documents you load are never sent to the server
They’re really good, and the free version works very well for annotations and reading.
I only discovered this software because the company I work for adopted it as the pdf solution company wide.
Link: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor
Windows: Foxit PDF reader (free non bloated stuff)
Linux: Okular or gnome Preview