Show HN: Sioyek – PDF viewer for reading research papers and textbooks

Previous discussion from 7 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27893303" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27893303</a>

For research work I prefer LiquidText on a 12.9” iPad with an Apple pencil. It’s critical for me to make notes and annotations.<p>It’s crazy how far pen computing has come. I was an early adopter of this as a college student back in the 2000’s. I had a Toshiba laptop which had a screen that would rotate around and fold on itself to become a tablet. It had a pen for writing and ran a special version of Windows designed for tablets. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-gadgeteer.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;toshiba_portege_m200&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-gadgeteer.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;toshiba_portege_m200&#x2F;</a>)<p>There weren’t many good sources of PDFs so I made my own. I would take my textbooks to Kinkos where they had an industrial paper cutter that was able to slice off the binding, leaving me with a bunch of loose pages. I would use a double sided auto-feed scanner to scan all the pages into searchable PDFs.<p>Sadly the technology wasn’t ready for prime time. The software wasn’t good enough, drawing was limited and not many apps took advantage of the pen. The hardware was heavy, bulky, and I always had to be around an outlet because the battery life was abysmal.<p>An iPad + pencil is a truly remarkable experience compared to that previous setup.

It would be great to reflow the document in single column mode, not to scroll back from the bottom of the left one to the top of the right one.<p>Actually, if these document are mostly consumed on screen, just write them single column, half of an A4 or Letter, or plain HTML. Do they keep creating PDFs because publishers sell paper journals?

I haven&#x27;t tried this yet, but the idea that I can click on a reference and have a window pop up to show me the equation&#x2F;figure&#x2F;table without actually taking me there is awesome. I&#x27;ve been trying to figure out how to do this pop-up thing in latex so it would do this in regular pdf viewers but the current methods I&#x27;ve seen are all too clunky. To be able to do this purely in the viewer is fantastic.

The preview feature, in particular, is exceptionally important. I cannot overstate what a difference it makes when reading deeply cross-referenced material.

This looks great. It was obviously created by someone who reads technical papers, and figured out how to make the process more convenient. Going to install as soon as I finish enjoying the videos—which are also well done.

A nice feature would be the ability to say from which page, page counts starts.<p>Many books label the first page of chapter 1 as page 1, and the preceding pages I… XI …<p>My solution is to split the pdf into 3<p>- before page 1 - main content - index (everything after main content)<p>This makes it possible to type the page number and go to that page.

Since this topic is likely to garner people who do or use research I hope to find an answer to the burning question of why on Earth don&#x27;t researchers put a freaking publication year in their paper. Sometimes it&#x27;s virtually impossible to learn if the paper is 20- or 2-years old. For something that matters quite a lot I always find this &quot;tradition&quot; a bit nonsensical.

Are the notes and highlights stored in the PDF? Asking because I use Zotero in several machines and I need annotations and highlights to be synchronized without much hassle.<p>Zotero is quite close to provide a PDF reader itself (available in the Beta release, AFAIK), but nice to see alternatives with academic documents in mind.

This looks really neat. I hope to make use of it.<p>I noticed a minor error in the tutorial under Basics: &quot;scrolling down half of screen width&quot; should be something like &quot;scrolling down half the window height&quot;. Animating the scrolling would make it much less disorienting.<p>Is there a way to see a list of marks? Slices of the screen like the reference preview would be great, but just a list of defined mark names and page numbers would be useful.<p>I&#x27;d love proper touch support. It&#x27;s so much faster for zooming in on figures or scrolling through pages quickly.<p>I often view PDFs with two pages side by side in Adobe Reader or Sumatra, and that&#x27;s great for looking for things (move through documents with left and right arrows). I&#x27;d miss that.

Installed using the zip file, and it works great. Fantastic job!<p>But I thought you’d like to know that I couldn’t get it to compile on a Debian system. I followed your instructions, but found I also had to install<p><pre><code> libglu1-mesa-dev libxi-dev libxrandr-dev </code></pre> and then the build script failed with<p><pre><code> Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: core gui sql opengl widgets quickwidgets 3dcore 3danimation 3dextras 3dinput 3dlogic 3drender openglextensions </code></pre> I have QT installed, but I couldn’t figure out which packages are missing.

I have been using this as the PDF viewer on Windows for few months now, and like it. Thanks for creating this. I like the fast bookmark lookup (t+start typing), vim like bindings. Dark mode also works well. Real estate is maximally used for the content.<p>There were couple of features that I missed - and needed to fire up a different viewer: 1. View PDF properties 2. Enter a slide-show mode, where a full page is shown and arrow keys advance (not scroll) the page.

What about notes? Is there a way to add notes to highlights? It would be nice if they are also displayed on the side.

This looks great. Now I need it in emacs. pdf-tools could probably emulate some of these features with enough work…

What I like most about this is the the idea of clicking a reference to display a floating preview of the concerning paper information, figure or table. That seems like a really nice solution!<p>Any idea which other PDF viewers implement this behavior?

Pdfs often have huge margins, so a feature I&#x27;d like to have is soft crop - just for viewing, without modifying the file, like goodreader has. Although it&#x27;s not as important on desktop as it is on a tablet.

What would be the benefit of using this compared to something like Sumatra?

Does it fit page correctly according to each page size, rather than the max page size? This is one bug in zathura that bothers me.

It&#x27;d be nice if it would automagically find the PDF&#x27;s BibTex corresponding entry...

I wonder how far from Linux-equivalent of Marginotes we are. Seems like a lot

Does this work on Linux?

From a world-class research university, I hold a Ph.D. in math and am pretty good with D. Knuth&#x27;s math word processing software TeX.<p>I don&#x27;t like trying to read PDF files of math on a computer screen: Typically the fonts are way, Way, WAY too small unless I <i>magnify</i> the display of the file a LOT, but then the lines are WAY too long to fit on the screen forcing me to use the horizontal scroll bar as the main effort in reading the math. Or put another way, in PDF files of math documents, nearly always there are WAY too many characters per line. The situation seems to be that the journal wanted to save on paper and ink!!!! When I develop a document with TeX, I use the TeX commands to <i>magnify</i> the fonts by a LOT. Bluntly, without a screen at least four feet wide with maybe 16,000 pixels per line, reading the usual PDF file of math is a PAIN. So, sure, I&#x27;m eager for better ways to read PDF files of math.<p>My reactions to this OP (original post):<p>(1) I have no idea what is meant by a &quot;middle click&quot;, nor would I have any idea where to look up the meaning. There might be a rule in technical writing -- never, ever, but NEVER, not even once in a whole career, on risk of horrible pain, e.g., a barbed wire enema, use terminology that is not very, VERY, essentially universally, well understood without explanation or at least a reference. This rule would also apply to acronyms.<p>(2) For searching a PDF file of math, I have no idea how I would type in the math expression to be searched for. Maybe the software is accepting TeX syntax -- I can guess that even that approach would have problems.<p>(3) For the video, the text is far, far too small to read and goes by far too fast to get any information at all.<p>Broadly I can&#x27;t make any useful sense out of the OP at all.<p>I&#x27;m eager for better ways to read PDF files of math papers, and maybe there is some good work and good utility here, but I have zip, zilch, zero understanding of what is being attempted or how it would work -- nichts, nil, nada, none.<p>Uh, this is not nearly the only place where some technical material could use better technical writing.