What PDF viewer do you use?

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:

  pdfless () 
  { 
      pdftotext -layout "$1" - |
          sed 's/\f/\n\n ----------------- -----------------  ----------------- ----------------- \n\n\n/g' |
          ${PAGER:-less} -S
  }

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.

Windows: Firefox and SumatraPDF.

SumatraPDF supports lots of formats, super convenient and lightweight: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

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

I've found Okular to be the best, even on Windows. You don't need the whole KDE-on-Windows, they offer standalone installers on their web site.

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.

I’m developing https://simplePDF.eu on my free time.

It’s more of a PDF editor / annotator than viewer but it may suit your needs nonetheless:

You can open multiple multiple tabs in your browser to view the same PDF at different chapters for example

Some additional details:

- entirely free

- everything happens locally in your browser: the documents you load are never sent to the server

PDF-XChange Editor, on Windows.

They’re really good, and the free version works very well for annotations and reading.

I only discovered this software because the company I work for adopted it as the pdf solution company wide.

Link: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

What issues do you have with Preview? Answering this question might make it easier to help you find an alternative.

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.

macOS: Skim (free lean macos pdf reader)

Windows: Foxit PDF reader (free non bloated stuff)

Linux: Okular or gnome Preview

Linux: mupdf, Windows: Sumatra PDF

Microsoft Edge

Firefox, QPDF, Edge

okular