I’ve been having a hard time looking for a pdf viewer that has a specific feature, and have been meaning to ask for a good enough one to use instead.
The feature i was looking for is viewing a directory of files at once without having to open multiple files at once and navigate from tabs, sort of like a file explorer and a pdf viewer in one, which might be a lot to ask.
What I’m asking for right now is what software would you use if you needed to read plenty of pdf files from the same source?
If you don’t have anything specific that solves this, I’d still like to know if there is a “good enough” pdf viewer, as the browser doesn’t feel like a good enough solution for my problem.
- Note that i do not need to edit the files, just view them.
VSCodium (or any other flavour) with the PDF Viewer plugin will allow you to browse and view PDFs.
Will remember this as this might be close enough in case other solutions won’t do
Firefox
Maybe I would
- Create a file called
pdfs.html - Add embedded PDFs
<embed src="pdf1.pdf"></embed> <embed src="pdf2.pdf"></embed> <embed src="pdf3.pdf"></embed> - Maybe give it a container div with display grid for min size and useful layout
- Open the HTML file in my webbrowser Firefox
To generate the embed codes for every PDF file in a folder I would use my command line shell Nushell, which generates the embeds for all files for me.
ls *.pdf | each {|x| $'<embed src="($x.name)"></embed>'} | str join- Create a file called
Is this the sort of thing you’re looking for?
It’s a php file you drop into a folder that creates a gallery of the files (including pdfs). There are security settings and visual customisations you can change. If you know what you’re doing you can access the file remotely, too. I’ve used it for a while and found it helpful.
Looks perfect to my use case, will try it out, thanks :)
What do you mean by “open multiple files at once” and “viewing a directory”?
Replied to schnurrito with the answer. In short, i want to view files in a directory as one would view photos in a gallery, as I can’t always tell beforehand which file is relevant to me and I’d like to be able to move quickly between files, instead of opening many files and then closing the irrelevant ones.
So you want a preview of the first page of each PDF as a thumbnail?
No, i want an easy way to navigate between unopened pdf files within the same directory
I think OP might be looking for something like nomacs or Gwenview except for PDFs instead of images. I don’t have the answer to the question, but I can see what OP is looking for.
That’s pretty close to what I’d be looking for, yes, a problem I’m having with common pdf viewers is that I’d need to open the files I’d want to read from beforehand, instead of just passing to the next file like i would in a gallery.
This requires that I’d know which files are relevant to me before reading said files.
That said, my use case does sound unique so I’m not surprised it’s hard to figure out what im looking for :)
KDE’s Dolphin (a file explorer) can show previews of PDF files.
Emacs can easily do that pdf viewer and one of the several tree folder packages.
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