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Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
- pazimzadeh 2y agoIs there something like this for iPad? Reading research articles is a painful process having to flip back and forth between text, figures and references all the time
- 0x38B 2y agohttps://www.liquidtext.net/ https://www.liquidtext.net/ is unique in its feature set and use of gestures and stylus. It’s definitely worth trying.
- sva_ 2y agoDid you try the Google Scholar PDF reader? It makes citations clickable (sometimes)
- k310 2y agoI have used MarginNote and Notability in the past. Take a quick look to see if they do what you want with PDF's.
- samatman 2y agoI use GoodReader. I'm open to trying something else, but it has folders, bookmarks, annotations, the basics. It lacks all of the fancy stuff in the linked program, though. PDF reading is the main use I have for a 13 iPad, and I do enough of it that it justifies the device.
- bluechair 2y agoAnother vote for GoodReader
- vzaliva 2y agoI work a lot with academic papers on iPad and PDF expert is the best! https://pdfexpert.com/ https://pdfexpert.com/
- ykonstant 2y agoThe author is trying to make a version for Android and iOS. The Android version is almost ready, but they're having trouble with the iOS version.
- behnamoh 2y agoI use this all the time. It's a nice app. Although some of the features such as jumping to citations are available in Google Scholar extension for Chrome. I just love the idea of vimifying my apps. Before Sioyek, I used Karabiner to set j/k/etc. in macOS Preview so I could navigate using vim keys, but that was a tedious process and didn't have many features that Sioyek offers. Also, I use a solarized background color for PDFs to avoid eye strain, and the app supports night mode even for the graphs in PDFs! Some gripes with this app: - There's an extension that lets you view PDFs in two columns (panels) side by side. But that literally changes the actual PDF files! - Plugins are generally challenging to install. I found a workaround and reported it, but IDK if the author took that feedback to improve the app. - To my knowledge, the app stores its configs in the Applications directory of the app. It'd be nicer to have them in ~/.config. - The feature to quickly open files in a directory doesn't work for cloud drives (including iCloud).
- lugu 2y ago+1 for the complexity to install extensions. I really can't remember the name sioyek so I made it an alias to xpdf.
- mistrial9 2y agooohh thats not lucky.. established toolset named the same
- hexomancer 2y agoSioyek developer here. > - There's an extension that lets you view PDFs in two columns (panels) side by side. But that literally changes the actual PDF files! We have added native two-panel mode in development branch. > - Plugins are generally challenging to install. I found a workaround and reported it, but IDK if the author took that feedback to improve the app. In the development branch we have added support for native javascript extensions (with no external dependencies because we use Qt's internal js engine) which should be a lot easier to work with > - To my knowledge, the app stores its configs in the Applications directory of the app. It'd be nicer to have them in ~/.config. Also I think in the development branch you can use ~/.config, I am not 100% sure though.
- ufo 2y agoDoes the table of contents work if the pdf doesn't come with a table of contents? (That's something I always wished my pdf reader could do)
- jigneshdarji91 2y agoYes > If set and the file doesn’t have a table of contents, we use heuristic methods to create a table of contents. You can use max_created_toc_size to prevent creating very large table of contents. https://sioyek-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html#create-table-of-contents-if-not-exists https://sioyek-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config...
- isotypic 2y agoSortof - sioyek will parse the text and attempt to create a table of contents (this does not modify the base pdf), but the accuracy/usefulness varies. For papers I have found it works reasonably well, just sometimes misses a few sections or includes a few junk entries. For textbooks, especially ones with heavy math typesetting, there are too many junk/missing entries a lot of the time in my experience. For papers or for textbooks I only need a small subset of, I find the autogenerated table of contents + bookmarks is typically sufficient. For other cases I like to use pdf.tocgen (https://github.com/Krasjet/pdf.tocgen https://github.com/Krasjet/pdf.tocgen) to semi-manually generate a correct table of contents.
- ufo 2y agoThanks, I'll look into both!
- emmelaich 2y agoThe website says yes: https://sioyek.info/ https://sioyek.info/ Link should be to the website imho.
- burgerrito 2y agoSuch a good PDF viewer. My favorite feature from this program that doesn't exist in any other PDF reader (AFAIK) is visual mark mode, where it highlight each line you read. Very good to reduce eye strain
- anthk 2y agoWith MUPDF I just change the background colour to something else: mupdf -C "#FFFFC0" file.pdf
- burgerrito 2y agoLate reply, but there is an even better option, pressing F8 will turn on dark mode, inverting the PDF colors (not sure if that includes images inside PDF, figures does inverted though)
- mkl 2y agoThat's completely different. See "Visual Mark" here: https://sioyek-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html https://sioyek-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage....
- anthk 2y agoI know, but that was a hint on reducing the visual fatigue.
- generationP 2y agoIs it good at digesting huge lists of PDFs (say, 100 000)?
- jigneshdarji91 2y agoFrom what I understand, there's no bulk import or open dir feature.
- philips 2y agoI recently started using an eink Supernote device in A5 size and it is really change the way I interact with PDFs. The best part is the software is native PDF highlighting and commenting and leave comments using handwriting recognition. Unrelated to PDF I built a Supernote Obsidian plugin too. https://github.com/philips/supernote-obsidian-plugin https://github.com/philips/supernote-obsidian-plugin
- wonger_ 2y agoWhat else about the Supernote changed the way you interact with PDFs, besides highlighting and handwritten comments? Does the form factor make a big difference? Asking out of curiosity since I've been eyeing eink tablets for a while.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- philips 2y agoThe main thing is reading long form PDFs doesn’t feel like a chore because it was hard to get comfy and just read without printing. And frankly I am not always near my printer when a paper comes up I want to read. A laptop or display just doesn’t work for me. Also, unlike print outs I can have everything just in my bag at all times. The supernote is light and the right size so reading lying down, at the couch, or sitting on the ground works for me.
- relyks 2y agoWhat made you choose the Supernote over the Remarkable?
- BlueTemplar 2y agoSeems to be much better at notetaking, as well as not as locked down ? https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Note-Taker_Supernote_A5X https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Not... Myself, I just bought the Note Air 3C a few hours ago - I've literally waited a decade for color to show up ! Maybe in yet another decade something GAFAM-free, like PineNote, will be viable, sigh...
- drwu 2y agoSioyek has nice features, however, it was quite buggy. Fixing bugs and writing tests may take a lot of efforts.
- throwaway425933 2y agoTangentially related. does anyone know a good pdf reader with LLM based search integrated? Suppose I want search for "cities in USA", in the document, it should show all occurences new york, los angeles and chicago, for example.
- indit 2y ago[PDFgear](https://www.pdfgear.com/ https://www.pdfgear.com/) has LLM integrated, it is currently free.
- throwaway425933 2y agoAppreciate the response!
- geartheworld 2y agoThank you for sharing PDFgear here. The LLM in it is pretty helpful and indeed free.
- Physkal 2y agoThis is desktop only, correct? Personally I've been using Librera for my textbooks, would love to try some other recommendations.
- hkmaxpro 2y agoThey are working on an Android version that you can build from their development branch: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/issues/840 https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/issues/840
- pyromaker 2y agoI took a bit more collaborative approach to reading and discussing research papers (https://www.scholars.io https://www.scholars.io or https://app.scholars.io https://app.scholars.io) and allow people to annotate, comment and collaborate on research.
- sebmellen 2y agoSeems like an abandoned project — the latest commit to main was two years ago!
- hkmaxpro 2y agoTheir development branch is very active (last commit 3 weeks ago): https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/tree/development https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/tree/development
- z2h-a6n 2y agoAre you perhaps referring to the latest release (which was 1.4 years ago) rather than the latest commit on main (which was 41 days ago)?
- hexomancer 2y agoSioyek developer here. As others have mentioned the development branch is fairly active. I also have my own private branch which I have not published yet until it is more stable, the last commit in my private branch is yesterday (6 commits actually).
- sebmellen 2y agoAwesome
- felipefar 2y agoI've been working on having my notes better integrated with the content I read. I try to gather references to where an idea is developed/contradicted in the literature, or just collect good ideas. Cahier (https://getcahier.com https://getcahier.com), the software I'm developing, supports creating cards with references to passages in the PDFs read. It's exciting to see the developments that are being made in this area in the past few years.
- angleofrepose 2y agoCould you expand on what you see as exciting developments? I’ll have to check out the op post link as well as yours and others in the thread. It’s been a few years since I seriously looked at options for my personal use, but I remember being quite disappointed in the options I found. Zotero and org-noter seemed two of the best (though in completely different ways) pieces of software I could find regarding reading or organizing pdfs. I trialed OneNote for a year and liked it in the moment, but zero support for navigation or discovery or review of information make it untenable for building a knowledge base or doing literature review. I imagine that software which makes reading and connecting document information (in any form: pdf, html, video or other) could be so much better than what I use daily.
- felipefar 2y ago1) The post-roam research note-taking apps (Obsidian, logseq) have shown the usefulness of creating notes with links, back-links and databases. 2) Document editor apps (Notion, Craft) have popularized the concept of documents as a set of text and non-text blocks. They're useful and provide rich building blocks for documents. 3) Some design engineers are exploring multi-modal text editors. Text, audio and video in the same document, integrated with CRDTs for collaboration. One would think that digital text editing had already reached state of the art, but the work above shows that there's plenty to discover yet. I'd love to hear your take on what you think could be much better.
- CiceroCiceronis 2y agoCahier looks like exactly what I’ve been hoping for for a long time. People have been taking “knowledge management” seriously for a few years now and we have a number of great tools like Obsidian, Zotero, Anki, and their brethren. But there’s still no real good solution to properly highlight and annotate documents, then link those outside their originating document into the broader context of one’s notes. Instead you end up with multiple silos—a Zotero full of papers, an Obsidian full of notes etc. This strikes me as a definite step in the right direction—thinking about knowledge management as an integrated process, with a workflow right through from reading, to taking notes, to organising those notes, to actively employing them to generate new insights and effectively write. (I guess my only concern is around potentially reinventing the wheel when it comes to some of these areas. E.g. do you plan to integrate every feature from Zotero, like the web-integrated grabber? That sounds like a prodigious amount of work, but without it it’s hard to fully supplant Zotero as a reference management solution. I’m curious as to your roadmap for this and what you see as the ultimate feature set and user workflow.)
- nailer 2y agoI’d love it if any PDF reader could simply reformat PDFs to be single column so they would be viewable on mobile devices. Essentially, as if they had never been written in PDF in the first place. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
- coredog64 2y agoBack in the early days of Sony e-ink readers (e.g. PRS-505) there were some apps that promised that capability. My recollection was that they were very fiddly and took a lot of time on your desktop before you got something readable.
- felipefar 2y agoI think that the main issue is that the columns in the PDF aren't identified as columns of sequential text, they are just rectangles. So there is no reliable way to reposition the text so that it doesn't use two columns. I've seen others propose to replace PDF in favor of more dynamic formats like EPUB. But I wonder if it wouldn't be more pratical to standardize tags and proporties that can be written to the PDFs, so that readers are better able to handle them.
- nailer 2y agoYes. But it’s relatively easy to train a model as there is a huge quantity of before text and after PDF available.
- nbenitezl 2y agoNot true, PDF standard has concept of text flow, that's why when you highlight horizontally from a column all the way to next column then all text in the first column is highlighted.
- gnicholas 2y agoAdobe has a feature called Liquid Mode that does this: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobat/ios/en/lmode.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobat/ios/en/lmode.html Note: they send your document to the cloud for processing.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoPortals is a very cool idea.
- aragonite 2y agoGreat tool! A feature suggestion: a common complaint about PDFs compiled from e.g. LaTeX is that text elements like "fi" in words such as "profile" cannot be correctly copied due to ligature encoding (e.g. try copying from the title in [1]: "profile" becomes "prole" and "identifiers" becomes "identiers"; also see discussion at [2]). An option to automatically fix this within the viewer could be a desirable feature — though admittedly I haven't thought this through and I'm not sure how feasible it is to implement such a feature at the viewer level. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22230-math-profile.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22230-math-profile.pdf [2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/33476/why-cant-fi-be-separated-when-being-copied-from-a-compiled-pdf https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/33476/why-cant-fi-be...
- kranner 2y agoI'm curious about the name. It seems to mean thirty-one/سی و یک in Persian. Is it a literary reference? Something to do with the Simurgh tale?
- hexomancer 2y agoSioyek developer here. There is no deep meaning behind the name, I just like the number 31 :)
- kranner 2y agoThanks for clarifying :)
- ajfriend 2y agoExcellent textbook examples in there :)
- qwerty456127 2y agoVery nice. It could only be made better by supporting more formats. Like mobi, fb2 and DJVU. I miss Sumatra when using a Mac as it could open all of these beautifully on Windows. Perhaps Sioyek could make a great replacement if coupled with a library like Pandoc.
- maskros 2y agoSince this viewer uses MuPDF as the document engine, it should already support EPUB, MOBI, FB2, and XPS document formats. If it doesn't, it should be a relatively simple task to upgrade the mupdf library to the latest version and recompile Sioyek to get all the file formats supported by mupdf.
- wanderingmind 2y agoYears ago during grad school, I used a tool called docear, which can manage papers and had a mind map to documents our ideas. It was a fantastic tool far beyond the time. I still have not found an elegant knowledge management tool like that one
- anigbrowl 2y agoI installed before I even got to the end of the feature list. I like it a lot, though it could use some improvements - I miss 2 page display, for example. While the keyboard control interface is great the absence of menu commands is not. It's weird to me that there's no way to bring up a help display from within the program (there's one there when you first open, but it vanishes as soon as you open something); I had to go to the website and move to the documentation page to see that I was doing. Still, it has so many good features built in that are optimized for research that it's worth the inconvenience.
- hexomancer 2y agoSioyek developer here. We have added 2 page mode in the development branch.
- anigbrowl 2y agoNow even more of a fan!
- Levitating 2y agoYou can open the command palette with : and search for commands and their bindings.
- eimrine 2y agoWhy have you not noticed anywhere that the program does not support Windows 7? I have read the system requirements, then found no info about 7, then run the .exe file, then realized it is not running without any error. There is a reason software must have a clearly defined system requirements.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>Why have you not noticed anywhere that the program does not support Windows 7? What's with the attitude? Maybe the author didn't expect people to still be running an OS that's 15 years old and 4 years since its End-Of-Life. Nothing wrong if you voluntarily choose to daily drive a dead OS today at your own risk, but expecting unpaid developers to cater to your super narrow niche is the epitome of entitlement.
- eimrine 2y ago> Maybe the author didn't expect people to still be running an OS that's 15 years old and 4 years since its End-Of-Life. Do you know why the System Requirements pages exist? Do you know who uses them? Do you know what the user does when he opens the System Requirement page and can not find the information whether this or that machine capable of running the software? > expecting unpaid developers to cater to your super narrow niche is the epitome of entitlement. Please don't read what I didn't write and have some respect for those who has just unfreezed from a time capsule. Disability to define whether I can run the program even after looking at the System Requirement page is kind of annoying.
- wtfwhateven 2y agoWhy are you using windows 7? "legacy operating systems that have not been supported by their vendor for 4+ years are not supported" is common sense
- eimrine 2y ago> Why are you using windows 7? I have a laptop with ATI videocard, it can not run a modern OS any more. > is common sense When the laptop was new, it was a common sense to support as much old Windozes as possible. Come on, this laptop definitely deserves to have a PDF reader.
- yolkedgeek 2y agoBeen using it for years. really the best pdf viewer for me.
- warpspin 2y agoLooks great. Wished this could be integrated into Obsidian as replacement for their PDF viewer.
- exe34 2y agoAs a simple workaround for the "flip between two pages" feature that is so easy in dead tree but harder on computers, I usually just open the pdf twice, if the software allows two running copies, or if the software is too clever, I just copy the pdf into a second copy and open that. I can then alt-tab between them and scroll to different parts. On the phone, I can use Acrobat Reader and Koreader at the same time.
- vinceroni 2y agoWould be great if this reader could be integrated with Zotero (maybe as a plug-in?)
- lou1306 2y agoReally interesting feature set! I'd like to ask, are notes and highlight saved separately or are they embedded with the PDF?
- hexomancer 2y agoThey are saved separately. We do have an "embed_annotations" command to create a new pdf file with annotations embedded.
- lelanthran 2y agoVery vim-like navigation (gg/G, commands, etc) Brilliant!
- atkirtland 2y agoI really liked Sioyek as a more fully-featured Zathura, but two features kept me from using it as my primary PDF reader: 1. Can't open multiple PDFs at the same time: Trying to open a second PDF with it while it's already open with some PDF crashes both instances. 2. Annotations are stored in a separate document rather than the PDF itself. Other users have noted both of these before. I didn't find an easy fix to 1, and a partial solution to 2 uses an extension, but IIRC it still requires manually running a command to transfer annotations to the PDF document itself.
- ryanwwest 2y agoAgreed on the multiple PDFs (I think that's a WIP), but I'm actually in favor of annotations stored in a separate document rather than embedded in the PDF. Ideally it would be nice to have both options which Zotero and your mentioned extension offer, but I'd prefer to have annotations separate so you can access a 'clean' copy of the PDF to e.g. share with others. Additionally, each PDF viewer that supports 'annotations' currently supports them in its own unique way and programs usually can't distinguish highlights/notes made by other programs from the original source. However, Zotero and a few other readers are starting to use Web Annotation Data Model (https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/) as a universal annotation storage mechanism, which I'm hoping will eventually allow you to create some highlights/notes in Sioyek, view and edit them in KOReader on an e-reader, then send an annotations file to a colleague who uses Zotero or Obsidian/PMK and has their own separate copy of that PDF (something I'm working on but very early on). https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is operates a bit like this.
- leephillips 2y agoFor the latest version (2.0.0): There is supposed to be a setting for (1), but the note in the supplied settings file seems to be misleading. I find that if I set `should_launch_new_instance` to 1, then I can have multiple PDFs open in Sioyek simultaneously, but only if I open the PDFs after the first from the termiinal; opening them from within Sioyek or from dmenu replaces the PDF that’s already open. But I never got any crashes. I use dwm on Debian. I consider (2) desirable.
- hexomancer 2y ago
- james_chu 2y agoIt's crazy, AI learning resources, added to Search Assistant, https://search.glarity.ai/ https://search.glarity.ai/
- navaed01 2y agoReally cool features, looks like it’s desktop based. What PDF readers are people using in their web applications?
- thy77 2y agoI want an easier way to switch between my blue green and yellow high lighters when reading a pdf for school. Also, how about a menu button that exports highlighted selections into a markdown file?