Is there a pdf viewer capable of opening multiple documents in the same window?

Question

I would like to open all chapters of my PDF ebooks in the same window but neither evince nor okular seems to be capable of doing that (at least not out-of-the-box).

Is there a way to work this out?

Solution 1

Using zathura with tabbed might help here:

Tabbed provides a "simple generic tabbed fronted to xembed aware applications" and zathura is a simple PDF viewer that is XEmbed-aware.

A much more heavyweight approach would be letting a browser provide the tabbing while having the chapters displayed using plugins, e.g. using mozplugger (even with evince) or using PDF.js (both working with Firefox).

Regarding the all-mighty Okular, there's a wishlist item and a workaround using konqueror (like the heavyweight option above).

However, were you to use a window manager that supports tabbed layouts, e.g. i3, notion or XMonad (there might be more!), any lightweight PDF-viewer (xembed'able or not) could work just fine. You'd just open several windows in a tabbed window manager layout (details vary with the actual WM) -- like @Marco suggested in his comment.

Solution 2

qpdfview is a lightweight tabbed document viewer that should suit your needs.

It's in the default Ubuntu and Debian repos. More recent versions can be found in the following PPAs:

• release versions

• daily builds

• experimental builds for Ubuntu 12.04 with backported poppler

Solution 3

I would recommend just setting PDFs to open in Firefox (or Chrome) at this point.

In GNOME Nautilus, this can be done using Properties -> Open With.

Unfortunately, the GNOME Evince document viewer maintainers have made it clear they aren't going to add tabbed viewing support.

Solution 4

For my Okular is the best. Only you have to config:

Then you need to mark:

"Open new files in tabs"

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Comments

[Marco]

What about creating a single PDF with all chapters? pdftk *.pdf cat output allchapters.pdf Or open one instance per PDF and use your window manager, instead of the PDF reader, to manage the windows.

[Spandan Chatterjee]

I second what Marco said. Most PDF viewers don't behave like web browsers.

[Jaleks]

Why is Okular not capable of using tabs? Just activate the according 'Open new files in tabs' in the settings.

[sjsam]

qpdfview is nice light weight and great for the job

[Shamaoke]

To start zathura embedded into tabbed use tabbed -c zathura -e.

[NelsonGon]

This is great but browser based readers often lack such features as highlighting which is why I love Edge. If we could get Edge for Linux, I would definitely use that. Chrome is not so great either.