Show HN: Sioyek – PDF viewer for reading research papers and technical documents
I tried the Windows download and went through the tutorial.  Some feedback:<p>1. The low latency feels really good.  It&#x27;s snappy.<p>2. Smart Jump is great.  It seems to target the figure caption though, and depending on zoom level &#x2F; window size might leave most of the figure out of view.  To be fair, the figure links that publishers bake into their PDFs often have the same problem.<p>3. Smart Jump to figures worked reliably in the scientific articles I tried.  Smart Jump to bibliography entries and equations did not, although it worked in the tutorial PDF.  Journal PDFs have terrible formatting, so this is understandable.  One test case I tried was using a wingdings-like font for the citation brackets; what looked like [13] was stored as @13#.  So smart jump works best with well-formed PDFs, but well-formed PDFs also usually already have links embedded.<p>4. The helper window opened behind the main window (for me, anyway), which is a little awkward.<p>5. As I was reading, I found myself wanting Smart Portals more than Smart Jump.  Same automatic cross-reference detection as Smart Jump, but defining a Portal instead of a link.<p>6. The view in the helper window can&#x27;t be zoomed or panned, so unless it&#x27;s kept at the same width as the main window was when the portal was captured, the helper window tends to crop out part of the captured content.<p>7. The keyboard-centric navigation is well done and a unique selling point.  The Windows file picker feels out of place with this though; I&#x27;d expect the file picker to work more like the bookmarks list.<p>8. I found myself liking shift-o more than I thought I would, more than tabs.  It would be helpful to be able to clear entries from the previously opened list though; mine is now littered with test files.<p>I think I would mainly consider Sioyek when reading book-length PDFs, as some books have a lot of distant cross-references and Sioyek&#x27;s features could save time there.  Probably not article-length PDFs since their brevity makes them easy to navigate by default, and they unfortunately tend to break smart jump.