keyboard friendly PDF viewer

[Eli the Bearded]

For years, xpdf was my PDF viewer of choice. It was a tad old-fashioned
looking (in choice of X widgets used) and not great at printing, but it
made up for those flaws in two ways: fast, and decent keyboard
navigation. 'space' for next page, 'p' for previous page, '[' and ']'
for page rotation (each in different directions), and 'q' for quit.

That was up to xpdf 3.x. In the new xpdf 4.x, all the defaults changed.
Which, ho-boy, was annoying. Only 'space' still worked.

Fortunately, xpdf has a fullfeatured config fot the .xpdfrc file. Here's
what I've come up with to make xpdf 4 work like I expect:

$ grep ^bind ~/.xpdfrc
bind space any nextPage
bind pgup any nextPage
bind p any prevPage
bind pgdn any prevPage
bind f any find
bind n any findNext
bind N any findPrevious
bind G any gotoLastPage
bind [ any rotateCW
bind ] any rotateCCW
bind q any quit
bind ? any showKeyBindings
bind - any zoomIn
bind + any zoomOut
bind z any zoomFitWidth
$

It's perhaps a bit crude, since the "context" (always "any" in my usage)
could be made more specific, and I might have missed some key commands.
Anyone else using xpdf and have better?

Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?
Note that for me, using control/alt with keys is annoying.

Elijah
------
has been reviewing a lot of PDF files today

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?
> Note that for me, using control/alt with keys is annoying.

You can still have the old Motif-based Xpdf 3 with modern PDF
rendering thanks to Xpopple.

http://offog.org/code/xpopple/

This is also still packaged for Debian as "xpdf". Xpdf 4.x switched
to Qt instead of Motif.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

[Russell Marks]

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

> For years, xpdf was my PDF viewer of choice. It was a tad old-fashioned
> looking (in choice of X widgets used) and not great at printing, but it
> made up for those flaws in two ways: fast, and decent keyboard
> navigation. 'space' for next page, 'p' for previous page, '[' and ']'
> for page rotation (each in different directions), and 'q' for quit.

Same here.

> Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?

I tried a few PDF viewers a while back and ended up quite liking mupdf
(from the Debian package). I'll admit I don't find all the keys used
ideal, and I'm not sure if you can easily change them. But it does
have some vi-like keys, and there's W and H to do fit-to-window-width
and fit-to-window-height which I find particularly useful.

Checking mupdf.com, it says this:

"For Linux and Windows there are two viewers. One is a very basic
viewer using x11 and win32, respectively. It has been supplanted by a
newer viewer using OpenGL for rendering, which has more features such
as table of contents, unicode search, etc. We keep the old viewers
around for older systems where OpenGL is not available."

Debian Bullseye has the X11 one, but it looks like they're switching
to the GL one in Bookworm.

-Rus.

[Stéphane CARPENTIER]

Le 05-06-2022, Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> a écrit :
>
> Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?

Some years ago I tried some keyboard driven pdf viewers and stuck
with zathura. Don't remember why, maybe it's because it's more
vimlike, but honestly, I don't remember why. Since then, I'm happy
with it.

As the keyboard is vimlike, for exemple, the "f" is not to find but to
follow a link. And the find is with "/" as in vim. There are the "Ng" to go
to page "N", "gg" to go at the beginning and "G" to the end.

My config file is really simple :
==========
# To have dark mode by default
set recolor

# ...keeping the real images
set recolor-reverse-video
==========

> Note that for me, using control/alt with keys is annoying.

And I can switch from reverse colors to normal colors with "CTRL+R".
It's one of the only reasons I'm using "CTRL" in zathura, I really
don't switch colors often in reading the documents.

I don't know if it will suit you better, I'm using it mostly to read
pdf, nothing requiring heavy use of keys. If you never heard about
it, you can give it a try, maybe you'll like it.

--
Si vous avez du temps à perdre :
https://scarpet42.gitlab.io

[Anna]

Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^h^h^h^hgmail.com> wrote:
> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>
>> For years, xpdf was my PDF viewer of choice. It was a tad old-fashioned
>> looking (in choice of X widgets used) and not great at printing, but it
>> made up for those flaws in two ways: fast, and decent keyboard
>> navigation. 'space' for next page, 'p' for previous page, '[' and ']'
>> for page rotation (each in different directions), and 'q' for quit.
>
> Same here.
>
>> Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?
>
> I tried a few PDF viewers a while back and ended up quite liking mupdf
> (from the Debian package). I'll admit I don't find all the keys used
> ideal, and I'm not sure if you can easily change them. But it does
> have some vi-like keys, and there's W and H to do fit-to-window-width
> and fit-to-window-height which I find particularly useful.

Second mupdf. Also there's fbpdf (from fbida) for tty, very cool!

> Checking mupdf.com, it says this:
>
> "For Linux and Windows there are two viewers. One is a very basic
> viewer using x11 and win32, respectively. It has been supplanted by a
> newer viewer using OpenGL for rendering, which has more features such
> as table of contents, unicode search, etc. We keep the old viewers
> around for older systems where OpenGL is not available."
>
> Debian Bullseye has the X11 one, but it looks like they're switching
> to the GL one in Bookworm.

You can always build from source with whatever flags you need.

[Eli the Bearded]

In comp.os.linux.misc, Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

i-see-what-you-did-there.gif

> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>> Anyone else with a keyboard driver pdf viewer they'd like to recommend?
> I tried a few PDF viewers a while back and ended up quite liking mupdf
> (from the Debian package). I'll admit I don't find all the keys used
> ideal, and I'm not sure if you can easily change them. But it does
> have some vi-like keys, and there's W and H to do fit-to-window-width
> and fit-to-window-height which I find particularly useful.

I installed the package version for my current Ubuntu system. First
impression: nice. Second impression: WTF?

Six page PDF document. Space bar moves from page 1 to page 2, page 2 to
page 3, page 3 to page 4, page 4 to page 5, but will not advance page 5
to page 6. It's not that mupdf won't display page 6, because down arrow
will advance page 5 to page 6.

It doesn't support --version / -v / -V to show a version, so I don't
know offhand how new/old this is. It _is_ the x11 version though.

Elijah
------
also recently tried zathura, meh

[Russell Marks]

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

[Re: mupdf]

> I installed the package version for my current Ubuntu system. First
> impression: nice. Second impression: WTF?
>
> Six page PDF document. Space bar moves from page 1 to page 2, page 2 to
> page 3, page 3 to page 4, page 4 to page 5, but will not advance page 5
> to page 6. It's not that mupdf won't display page 6, because down arrow
> will advance page 5 to page 6.

What mupdf does for Space is probably the thing I like least about it
(I just got in the habit of using cursor keys primarily), but even
with that context the above does sound really odd.

> It doesn't support --version / -v / -V to show a version, so I don't
> know offhand how new/old this is. It _is_ the x11 version though.

A strange omission, but I think on Ubuntu "dpkg -l mupdf" would give
the package's version number if needed.

-Rus.