I am a mathematician currently doing my PhD. I am working on a mac and have become a bit frustrated with preview as a PDF viewer. What good (and preferably free) viewer do you recommend?
It depends on context, platform, and needs. I'm virtually always reading, and occasionally processing / mining text. I'm not working with forms or editing PDFs.
For Linux, xpdf in all its Athena Xt marvelousness is still a good basic reader with a small footprint and good keybindings.
Where it's not sufficient, I'm turning to Zathura (from Suckless) by preference, otherwise Okular (KDE).
On OSX, Preview seems tolerably good.
I frequently read (or process) PDFs in the terminal. Popplar libraries / tools are excellent for this, including pdfinfo and pdftotext. The latter's been extended to provide a PDF viewer as a Bash function:
That swaps a pagebreak marker for the '^L' characters otherwise displayed.
On tablets, I've found the Onyx BOOX Neorader (a multi-format e-book reader_ quite good, though I've also used FBReader, PocketBook, and KOreader (the latter is praised by heavy users, I've found it confusing and unintuitive in occasional encounters).
I've used the FoxIt PDF reader, though not in years, probably a decade.
Haven't touched Adobe in something close to 20 years, possibly longer.
As a PhD student, if you are using Linux I'd highly recommend you to check out Sioyek (https://sioyek.info/) - works great for annotation/academic research.
It's made for reading technical books/papers and has quite a quiver of functionality supporting exactly that. Was discussed on HN twice already, last thread can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395649
On Mac: PDF Guru is basically unknown, but I find it great. Great annotation tools, clean UI, tabbed viewing. For academic papers, I keep them in Zotero and use the new built-in PDF reader to read and annotate them.
I'm not too happy with any PDF viewer on Linux. Zathura was good, but with pdfs other than A4 papers it got unwildly.
I've since switched to qpdfview, but zooming and panning feels sluggish. I noticed that a lot of PDF viewers have distinct "modes" and switching between them seems never obvious. Zoom mode, text-selection mode.
Because some people asked I will make this its own comment.
The main annoyance I have with Preview is that some of the settings are global. I usually have many PDFs open at the same time and you can't hide the sidebar / show chapters for just one PDF, it always changes for all of them. Also there are not tabs. There is no easy way to jump back and forth between two pages that might be far apart. And I wish I could peek links to other places in the same PDF.
The main annoyance is that some of the settings are global. I usually have many PDFs open at the same time and you can't hide the sidebar / show chapters for just one PDF, it always changes for all of them. Also there are not tabs. There is no easy way to jump back and forth between two pages that might be far apart. And I wish I could peek links to other places in the same PDF.
I’m also curious to know. Preview is pretty much the only tool I really miss whenever a switch from Mac to Linux for a while, and it works really well for annotating and basic editing (moving pages around)…
It randomly deletes all of the comments in the file. I had this happen at least four times. Preview overwrote the file, deleted all of my comments, which were at least a couple of hours of work.
I use Foxit reader, on windows not mac. I switched to them a number of years ago. Only problem is when they have an upgrade, they try and get you to do the '30 day trial' of their PDF editor.
For Linux, xpdf in all its Athena Xt marvelousness is still a good basic reader with a small footprint and good keybindings.
Where it's not sufficient, I'm turning to Zathura (from Suckless) by preference, otherwise Okular (KDE).
On OSX, Preview seems tolerably good.
I frequently read (or process) PDFs in the terminal. Popplar libraries / tools are excellent for this, including pdfinfo and pdftotext. The latter's been extended to provide a PDF viewer as a Bash function:
That swaps a pagebreak marker for the '^L' characters otherwise displayed.On tablets, I've found the Onyx BOOX Neorader (a multi-format e-book reader_ quite good, though I've also used FBReader, PocketBook, and KOreader (the latter is praised by heavy users, I've found it confusing and unintuitive in occasional encounters).
I've used the FoxIt PDF reader, though not in years, probably a decade.
Haven't touched Adobe in something close to 20 years, possibly longer.