Re: Academic workflow with old PDFs

[Stefan Monnier]

> P.S. note: Sioyek aims to reconstruct hyperlinks to references and
> equations in text even for old papers.  That's awesome and very useful,
> but unfortunately it seems to depend on the quality of the file, as
> sometimes it doesn't work. Here my need for a replacement.

FWIW, I mostly use `doc-view-mode` to read PDFs.  In many ways it's very
limited, but I like the fact that I can crop to the particular part of
the page(s) I'm interested in and that's preserved as I move between
pages (some other readers have an auto-crop feature which is even
better), and more importantly I can do `C-x 5 2` to see several pages at
the same time (I very often keep a frame/window displaying the
bibliography, but other times I use that to display a figure while
I read the corresponding description from another page, or to display
several figures next to each other, ...).

I tried Sioyek and it's nice, but not sufficiently nicer to make me
change :-)

Have you tried `pdf-tools`?  AFAICT it has all the advantages of
`doc-view-mode` but without its many limitations.  It's truly nice.
I don't use it often enough because all too often my main Emacs is in
a state of hacking that breaks my externally installed packages, so I'm
still used to using `doc-view-mode` as my main driver, but the more time
passes the more I find it too limited.


        Stefan