PDF viewers
On turning texts into font rendering errors
February 11, 2020 — March 21, 2023
I would like to have a PDF viewer that supports easy sharing of the same annotations across Linux desktop, macOS, iOS, and Android devices.
Q: Is that feasible?
A: Only if we expand the definitions of easy, annotation, and feasible.
1 Sioyek
Sioyek looks modern.
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on technical books and research papers.
… Quickly search your previously opened documents, table of contents, bookmarks, and highlights. Sioyek can even generate the table of contents if the document doesn’t have one!
It supports SyncTeX and many other thoughtful features I have not seen before.
2 Evince/Okular
Linux.
The KDE (okular) and GNOME (Evince) default PDF readers are more or less indistinguishable from the perspective of a user like me. Both are passable but have clunky annotation exchange. Evince has a terrible UI for even viewing annotations — It summarises the text of each annotation in the navigation sidebar as my name and the date, which is the most uniform and least interesting thing about my annotations. I already know my name. It’s the content of the PDF I am concerned with. Navigating that monolithic text blob by choosing which bits of it are useful to me is the whole reason I am using a computer here, not wondering what is truly me and what is someone else. I’m not saying there is no conceivable use case for such a UI, just not one that I have had thus far in my decades on this earth.
Also, it cannot save over the PDF I am currently editing; I must make a new copy then manually rename it over the previous version. This is because, I suppose, mint condition PDFs have a higher resale value? A concession to the NFT market?
Plus side: supports adequate latex synctex preview via evince-synctex.
3 Zathura
Zathura seems to be the document viewer recommendation du jour in certain linuxy circles. It does auto-syncing and updating and such. It has no annotation support AFAICS but goes fast. If you like typing / instead of Ctrl-F and think that you will save time by manually defining specific keyboard shortcuts in a config file, you will feel right at home.
4 Skim.app
Skim. Mac. TBD. Seems pretty good, if you have a Mac. Notable for its LaTeX sync support.
5 Qpdfview
Linux.
An alternative at the opposite end of the minimalism spectrum is qpdfview which, as the name suggests, clearly had a fractious committee behind the design decisions. It has dozens of settings with confounding nerdview names. Nonetheless, it can save and load PDFs, which is nice and not at all a given for the apps in this list. AFAICT it still doesn’t navigate PDFs by annotations, or support highlighting annotations of text in the commonly understood meaning of that term.
6 Mupdf
mupdf claims to work across all desktop platforms as well as mobile devices. Have not tested the features.
7 Acrobat
I’ve always disliked the gigantic Adobe Acrobloat Reader. It has become singularly useless to me now since there no longer seems to be a Linux version. Maybe one could run it in docker if one needed to fill out a form?
8 Incoming
There is cross-platform support from the commercial app foxit.