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

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

#2

Post by hexomancer »

Some of the features:

* You can middle click on a reference/figure to go to the reference/figure (even if the PDF doesn't have links)

* You can middle click on a paper name in references to directly search it on google scholar

* Searchable table of contents

* You can mark locations by character symbols (vim style)

Currently only the Windows build is available. Mac and Linux builds coming soon.

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

#3

Post by dfdz »

I really like the idea of building a PDF viewer for research papers.

One feature that I don’t see mentioned that would convince me to use the product is fast search (possibly after some pre computation)

When I’m reading a long technical document I often search for words/phrases to remember the definition

For some reason, this process is very slow for longer documents and take a couple seconds (various depending on pdf viewer

I’ve always wished this was fast. For example, if I’m going to be reading a paper for 1hr I wouldn’t mind if there computer spent the first minute building a data structure to enable faster lookup times

Does anyone know if a current pdf viewer has this feature

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

#4

Post by hexomancer »

dfdz wrote: post #3

I really like the idea of building a PDF viewer for research papers. One feature that I don’t see mentioned that would convince me to use the product is fast search (possibly after some pre computation) When I’m reading a long technical document I often search for words/phrases to remember the definition For some reason, this process is very slow for longer documents and take a couple seconds (various depending on pd…

I currently don't do any indexing for general search (though I do index the figures, references and equations when the book is first opened). But I do plan to index more things (like the definitions you mentioned) in the future.

I think current search performance is better than other PDF viewers though (sub-second on a 500 page PDF on my 6700K CPU).

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

#6

Post by joiguru »

hexomancer wrote: post #2

Some of the features: * You can middle click on a reference/figure to go to the reference/figure (even if the PDF doesn't have links) * You can middle click on a paper name in references to directly search it on google scholar * Searchable table of contents * You can mark locations by character symbols (vim style) Currently only the Windows build is available. Mac and Linux builds coming soon.

I am a researcher, and this seems incredibly useful for me. Will definitely give this a try when Linux builds are available.

One feature request that I would suggest is synctex support. I can see this to be being useful when writing a paper using LaTeX as well.

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

#9

Post by hexomancer »

joiguru wrote: post #6
hexomancer wrote: post #2

Some of the features: * You can middle click on a reference/figure to go to the reference/figure (even if the PDF doesn't have links) * You can middle click on a paper name in references to directly search it on google scholar * Searchable table of contents * You can mark locations by character symbols (vim style) Currently only the Windows build is available. Mac and Linux builds coming soon.

I am a researcher, and this seems incredibly useful for me. Will definitely give this a try when Linux builds are available. One feature request that I would suggest is synctex support. I can see this to be being useful when writing a paper using LaTeX as well.

Thanks! I do use this for LaTeX myself and synctex support is on my to-do list.

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

#10

Post by jnurmine »

hexomancer wrote: post #7
billconan wrote: post #5

I hope it can have annotation

Unfortunately it currently can't. But I do plan to add it eventually.

Annotations are super useful.

Please consider storing the annotations external to the PDF. For example, Okular wants to save these to the PDF itself. This doesn't work very well with a read-only network drive (read: corporate environment).

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