Open source PDF viewer with Dual Page feature?

SentientFishbowl@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 33 points –

Hello, any recommendations for a libre PDF with support for dual page (with the option to adjust which 2 pages are displayed)? Normally I use MuPDF, but there's a document I would like to read which would greatly benefit from some additional features...

18

Firefox

Okay, after trying a few different options out I think we have a winner :) Firefox suits my needs the best, thanks for the suggestion

Firefox honestly got many really good editing features, to fulfill the needs of many people.

Stuff that PDFArranger and maybe Okular do is missing.

When zathura (my beloved) isn't feature-rich enough for my needs I usually turn to okular. Sure, it's kde, so if you're on a pure gnome system you're going to have to install a bunch of dependencies, but if that's not a problem for you, okular is quite good in my experience!

I'm on XFCE, so was hoping for an alternative to Okular!

Sure, that's extremely fair! Those qt dependencies are no joke! How do you feel about Evince (apparently now called gnome document viewer)? It seems to be the standard gtk pdf viewer, but I've never used it, so I actually don't know what it's features are like. It's a heavier application than mupdf (of course), but at least you don't need to install qt to use it!

GNOME's Evince and Cinnamon's xreader both do this as well

I came here to say Zathura (I've been actively using it for the last few days going through K&R C for university) but I see everyone else is saying it too. The "d" key will give you dual pane mode iirc. And what I also do is I use "s" to make the pdf match the window width rather than height and then use Capital H and L to read the top and bottom of the pages, and Capital J and K to go to the next 2 pages.

Zathura, which is a lot like MuPDF. Press d to toggle the dual page view.

Edit: My bad, just read the part where you said "the option to adjust which 2 pages are displayed". The dual page view in Zathura will show 2 adjacent pages. When I've needed to do that I've just opened two Zathura windows. Especially with a tiling WM it's practically the same feature.

My use case is a pdf of a book which is meant to be read across two pages - wouldn't work if it's displaying pages 1 and 2 together instead of pages 2 and 3, if you see what I'm saying. Does Zathura allow for that?

Zathura always displays odd pages on the right and even pages on the left. Which is how books are conventionally displayed, ie page 1 is typically recto. I don't think this behaviour can be configured, but if you need pages 2 and 3 displayed together then your book would display correctly in Zathura dual page mode. But if you needed 1 and 2 displayed together I don't think Zathura can do that unfortunately

Zathura, although it can be a little challenging to navigate on your first few goes.