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

Anyone have any success building this on an M1 Mac?

Really cool software and feature set.

Great. Now embed it into a device with 8 1/2 x 11 inch actual screen area with a color e-paper screen and a micro-usb.

I read research papers on tablets all the time and not one of them seems to be able to show the whole page as large as a piece of letter paper.

I bought one but retuned it immediately. The software is just a dumpster fire. Slow, laggy, no sensible options to crop pdfs or research papers. Even the ebook reader is terrible compared with my kobo. I bought a remarkable because, even though the default reader is also pretty terrible (incredibly slow is the main issue) I figured there might be more of a community push to develop a good solution. I’m still waiting though, and basically haven’t switched to e ink for anything except reading novels yet.

This is great! I love the keyboard-based navigation, and the portals are particularly wonderful, almost making me want to turn my documentation monitor back from vertical to horizontal aspect ratio.

A few questions/feature requests/comments: Is there a way to link to a page/mark/bookmark/figure from outside the document? Can we export the marks/bookmarks/document state to a plaintext-compatible file? And please add a dark mode, full-screen white is just painful after a while. Also, I'm not sure I understand the distinction between marks and bookmarks; are marks single-character only? And can you not jump straight to a bookmark, only bringing up and searching the bookmarks context menu?

I'm an electrical engineer, constantly referencing PDF-based datasheets, application notes, whitepapers, and reference manuals like [this one] or [this other one]. They're similar to the more academic papers that this seems to be targeted towards, and suffer from many of the same problems. The current practice in the industry to make effective use of these PDFs is approximately summed up as "just be really smart and keep track of it all in your head." If you're unusually kind to your coworkers, your co-contributors, and (especially) your future self who haven't recently spent the same hours exhaustively reading these documents you'll mention in a comment in your SPI initialization code to "Set bit 13, CRCEN, before turning on bit 6, SPE, see ref manual page 808" or in your schematic that your PCB needs to "Route for additional 4.7 uF point of load capacitance within 25mm/nH/mOhm, see datasheet page 69".

I see that it can be run from the command line with the file name as an argument, but it doesn't respond to anything beyond argv[1], and the whole point is to be to deep-link inside the file. Ideally, I'd love to see a protocol handler like mailto: or winmerge: so that one could embed links inside PDFs. With that, a user looking at a readme document or code comment could jump to "sioyek://../docs/rm0377*.pdf?808gg" or ".pdf?gb=SPI_CR1".

I also see that it seems to store marks and other persistent data in the "test.db" SQLite file, I'd much rather see this as a JSON/XML/plaintext file (or at least exportable as such) so that I can add it to a project version control repository, allowing me to share my state with others and get it back later.

Regarding dark mode, I understand that some figures, background images, watermarks etc. will make this more difficult. But the most common case of black text on a white background is solved for me in the Firefox PDF viewer with a bookmarklet containing `javascript:(function(){viewer.style = 'filter: grayscale(1) invert(1) sepia(1) contrast(75%)';})()`. Foxit likewise has a night mode.

[this one]: https://www.st.com/resource/en/reference_manual/rm0377-ultra...

[this other one]: https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX77650-MAX776...

> A few questions/feature requests/comments: Is there a way to link to a page/mark/bookmark/figure from outside the document?

Yes you can (if I understood your question correctly). Press p and then navigate to the target file and then press p again to create a portal from the source PDF to the target PDF. (you can press tab to automatically jump to the target document if you need to)

> Can we export the marks/bookmarks/document state to a plaintext-compatible file?

Currently not but I could add it as it seems that a lot of people are requesting this feature.

> are marks single-character only? And can you not jump straight to a bookmark, only bringing up and searching the bookmarks context menu?

Yes. You are correct. Marks are meant for quick jumps around documents and Bookmarks are meant to be for more persistent situations (for example you can bookmarks an an exercise in a PDF so you can return to it at a later date when you have more time)

> "Set bit 13, CRCEN, before turning on bit 6, SPE, see ref manual page 808" or in your schematic that your PCB needs to "Route for additional 4.7 uF point of load capacitance within 25mm/nH/mOhm, see datasheet page 69".

I think portals are perfect for this use case because, as I said, you can create portals across different documents.