[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sioyek - PDF viewer for reading research pa...
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Show HN: Sioyek - PDF viewer for reading research papers and
technical documents
Author : hexomancer
Score : 196 points
Date : 2021-07-20 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sioyek.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (sioyek.info)
| kilodeca wrote:
| The README on GitHub f*cked up my phone. I had to take out the
| battery and boot.
| cproctor wrote:
| Thanks! This looks like a really useful contribution to the open
| community of research tools. One feature which would be a
| prerequisite for me is a structured export of data I produced
| through interaction with PDFs.
| hexomancer wrote:
| The data is stored on a sqlite database file next to the
| executable.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| Thanks, I can use it for reading technical material. Will it have
| true Dark Mode? This is something lacking if most if not all PDF
| viewers.
| hexomancer wrote:
| You can currently change the background color of the app (not
| the PDF) in the configuration file. We don't currently have
| True Dark Mode but it shouldn't be too hard to implement.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| I tend to use a custom PDF darkmode in Firefox for this very
| reason. I can't find a decent PDF viewer that supports it.
| (Linux)
| topspin wrote:
| I've been using Acrobat on a FireHD tablet with a dark mode
| plugin. It works quite well. I can't remember the last time I
| needed to inhibit the plugin to read something.
| hexomancer wrote:
| 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.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Can't wait to try as soon as Lunux built is available.
| jszymborski wrote:
| This was the sort of stuff that Readcube did that I was amazed
| by, but this being open and lighter makes it far cooler.
| soferio wrote:
| Liquidtext is a commercial multiplatform app with some similar
| and interesting functionality.
| sn41 wrote:
| Thanks a lot for your effort. Especially the last feature. I
| had personally made some modifications to mupdf on my machine
| for doing this, and add annotations using shortcut keys. But
| MacOS Catalina somehow screwed up my GL, and it renders the
| page very oddly, so it no longer works. This reader seems
| great.
| joiguru wrote:
| 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.
| hexomancer wrote:
| Thanks! I do use this for LaTeX myself and synctex support is
| on my to-do list.
| gluegadget wrote:
| Does the name mean 31?
| hexomancer wrote:
| yes.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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...
| hexomancer wrote:
| > 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > I think portals are perfect for this use case because, as
| I said, you can create portals across different documents.
|
| Many of the documents I'm consuming are PDFs, but I'm
| typically creating documents that are not PDFs like source
| code, Markdown/HTML, or schematics (the latter may
| eventually be exported to PDF, so the approach does have
| some merit). That's why I'd like a portal or bookmark to
| open/change focus to the app and jump to the target in one
| click from outside the document.
| billconan wrote:
| I hope it can have annotation
| hexomancer wrote:
| Unfortunately it currently can't. But I do plan to add it
| eventually.
| billconan wrote:
| so why do you choose https://mupdf.com/ as the pdf engine?
| how does it compare to google's pdfium
| https://opensource.google/projects/pdfium
| hexomancer wrote:
| I had some previous experience modifying Sumatra PDF which
| uses MuPDF so I was already familiar with MuPDF. I didn't
| really look into pdfium :D.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Just to add another viewpoint on annotations: I tend to
| severely edit a PDF while I'm reading it. For example: crop
| the top and bottom margins off, expand the left and right
| margins and use them for text boxes with notes to myself,
| draw on figures, rearrange figures and text (like a collage)
| so they're in more convenient places, and add color-coded
| highlights depending on whether the highlighted text is fact,
| opinion, an open question, etc. I edit the PDF directly so my
| notes are available even if I have to use another PDF
| viewer/editor. If I need to preserve the original PDF I
| archive it separately. I think one of the key advantages of
| digital medial is that the user can rearrange and edit it to
| suit their needs (the other advantage being search /
| automated indexing). Not sure how many people take this
| approach, and you're of course free to make the feature work
| however you think best. Just sharing as a counterpoint to the
| general consensus for a standalone annotation file.
| jnurmine wrote:
| 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).
| hexomancer wrote:
| What do you mean exactly by annotations?
|
| Sioyek currently does have a bookmark support which is
| external to the PDF (you can bookmark locations in PDF file
| and you can later quickly search in those bookmarks).
|
| But I assume you mean some sort of visual annotation that
| is drawn on top of the PDF?
| ableal wrote:
| One possibility is the "highlighting" that e-readers like
| the Kobo perform - I've used it for proofreading.
|
| No typing, just selecting a few words or lines. It's all
| collected in a notes page/doc, you later look at that and
| hopefully see or remember what was wrong and fix the
| original.
|
| Limited, but helpful.
| hexomancer wrote:
| We do currently have something like this feature. If you
| select a piece of text and then press the bookmark
| button, then the bookmark text will be automatically
| filled with the selected text. Later, the bookmarks can
| be searched by pressing `gb' (search the bookmarks in the
| current document) or `gB' (search all the bookmarks).
| IlliOnato wrote:
| I assume something like comments in Word, i.e.
| highlighting a fragment of document and "attaching" to it
| a piece of text.
|
| Not sure what is the good presentation for it: clicking
| or hovering, overlaying or pop-up or a separate window...
| I suppose to figure the best UX is not trivial, but even
| mediocre UX would be really great.
|
| And as others say, ideally keep the annotations outside
| of the document itself.
| gwittel wrote:
| Not the OP, but a related feature -- I could also see use
| in tying notes to a document or sentence.
|
| Sometimes I "translate" a difficult passage to something
| I can understand (on paper I might write this in
| margins). At other times, I end up accumulating
| definitions of terms (or letters) while reading a paper.
| Today I write those on a separate piece of paper so I can
| have my definitions table viewable at all times. It would
| be really nice to have that sort of thing stored and
| available while I'm working my way through a paper
| (perhaps similar to the portal feature).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Anyone have any success building this on an M1 Mac?
|
| Really cool software and feature set.
| daly wrote:
| 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.
| khqc wrote:
| Have you looked at the Onyx boox series? They have an e-ink
| tablet in A4 format (though no color yet)
| bigfudge wrote:
| 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.
| wdesilvestro wrote:
| This is phenomenal! I've been looking for something like this for
| a couple of years and am really excited to see someone building
| it.
|
| When do you expect the Mac/Linux builds to drop? Is there any way
| to follow your progress / support?
| hexomancer wrote:
| There is an open github issue on the linux build. Currently the
| project builds and works on linux without any issues. The only
| thing remaining is packaging the executable so that the user
| doesn't have to manually install all the libraries which is
| probably very simple but it is taking me a long time because I
| am a noob when it comes to linux buils :/ .
|
| The Mac version may take longer simply because I don't have
| access to a mac computer. Though theoretically it should
| compile on mac right now.
| jarenmf wrote:
| This looks great in particular the portals feature is very useful
| for reading papers. I hope it supports annotations even if just
| highlighting.
| osibert wrote:
| This is very cool. The two features I hope for are:
|
| 1) Annotations. Could be text bubbles in the margins, or perhaps
| a little glyph I can click on to see/edit the annotation text
| itself. Annotations should be stored separately in a text-based
| format to facilitate version control, sharing, and reuse. I want
| this for reviewing material from others as well as making my own
| notes (e.g., when working with a datasheet). What I really want
| is a whole workflow for reviewing, but just text comments would
| get much of the way there.
|
| 2) One column at a time options. Doesn't need to reflow, just
| needs to present the text in its natural width so as not to
| require scrolling up and back to navigate a print-oriented two-
| column layout that makes no sense on-screen. I wouldn't mind
| having to horizontal-scroll to see full-width figures and
| footnotes, but I really want to scroll only in one direction to
| read the text.
| antman wrote:
| Nice, also highlight creation would be a nice feature and command
| line argument to open a pdf on a specific page. That would allow
| a more robust pdf notes management.
| [deleted]
| dfdz wrote:
| 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
| hexomancer wrote:
| 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).
| liketochill wrote:
| Check out qiqqa or mendeley
| zhamisen wrote:
| Thanks! Always wanted a PDF reader with these features :)
| hellothereworld wrote:
| I propose, that the tagline should be: "The Vim for Scientific
| PDF"
| visarga wrote:
| I was hoping it was going to be a reflowing PDF reader that makes
| those narrow columns with small text into larger size text easier
| to read, like arxiv-vanity.com.
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