DJdjoldman·Mar 9, 2026Submission
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
2 points · Open discussionahrm
sioyek
C2021–2026
ahrm / sioyek
sioyek
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
14Distinct people
32Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
10KGitHub stars
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What it is
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Github : https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek As a mathematician, this is currently my favorite PDF viewer by far. The mini-window feature for referenced equations/theorems is…
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year32 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-08-22 08:47:37 UTC to 2026-03-09 12:46:56 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 5 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
32 sourcesGithub : https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
As a mathematician, this is currently my favorite PDF viewer by far. The mini-window feature for referenced equations/theorems is tremendous quality of life: we no longer need to page up to who knows where to check a statement, place and remember markers and so on.
In Sioyek –- a PDF viewer with a focus on technical books and research papersCheck out sioyek, it’s great and can open epubs like normal pdfs:
https://sioyek.info/
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
In Foliate: Read e-books in style, navigate with easeTheir development branch is very active (last commit 3 weeks ago):
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/tree/development
In Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papersThey are working on an Android version that you can build from their development branch:
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/issues/840
In Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papersSioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
336 points · Open discussionImproved over that https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/issues/1011
In Google Scholar PDF ReaderI found this related issue: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/issues/633
In Google Scholar PDF ReaderSioyek is a PDF viewer designed exactly for reading research papers and textbooks: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek.
In Google Scholar PDF ReaderThis would never happen but in an ideal world, we should be able to click on a citation to jump to the part of the paper that is being referenced and each paper page should have a discussion board so we can easily communicate with the authors and group the discussion in one place instead of us having to google to see if there is relevant discussion on twitter/reddit. We can even put links to talks, tutorials, blogs, github repo, demo, paperswithcode/google scholar/open review, background material, a timeline of citations in tree form on the same page(actually I am seeing more machine learning papers that have a project page that does some of these) or even turn it into a mini wiki. I just think html has so much more potential(especially now with LLM we can do semantic search). I wonder if there would be interest in such a chrom extension
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overlay.
Related projects:
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo
https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
https://academ.us/article/2111.15588/ (powered by https://github.com/jgm/pandoc I believe)
Sioyek: a PDF viewer optimized for reading research papers and textbooks. https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
It has a lot of niche features, but my favorite is the ability to preview or jump to references even when they are not linked in the PDF file.
In Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?Sioyek beats SumatraPDF for academic text work. Sioyek has Overview[0], Smart Jump and more features that helps academic text studies. Digital versions of page earmarks, pen highlighting and margin notes that are common in academic text usage. It feels like the main developer and contributors have personal experience of that kind of use and gear the application for it.
In contrast the SumatraPDF dev seems focused mostly on light, casual PDF viewing. Read short pdf files from start to end, add a few highlights, occasionally search.
One good feature SumatraPDF used to have, but removed, was an option to store annotations (such as colored text highlighting) in external .smx sidecar files. Similar to how VLC and other video players support sidecar .srt subtitle files.
Since a few years SumatraPDF now only writes annotations into the PDF file.
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That has some advantages (greater cross reader annotation compatibility, all in one file) but also disadvantages:
- Third party tools can't search or operate on the plaintext annotations. With the sidecar approach if highlighted text were to be stored as plaintext with location data in the sidecar file third party tools could use ripgrep or similar to do fast, powerful searching and filtering on highlights across a whole pdf collection.
- Annotation versioning.
- No convenient way to load different sets of annotations for a single file. Useful for academic text work where one source document may be highlighted differently for different research topics. With an API and support for third party tools toggling such sets could be instant and very user friendly. Without sidecar files the user has to keep separate copies of the pdf file and write different annotations to each.
- Modifying the source pdf can be an issue where text integrity is crucial. Many pdf documents are used as a shared source of truth and simple hashing can verify that all parties use the same unmodified document. That gets more complicated when annotations are written into the file, since different pdf applications do such writing differently.
Even though Sioyek is better for academic work I think there is a lot more to do. In some ways academic text work on a physical book still has a better UX. For example a glance at the edge of a physical book gives an overview of the earmark locations. A digital version of that would be a code editor minimap style sidebar that overview highlight and bookmark locations in the whole pdf document. The minimap could have a heatmap feature that colors (and gradually fades) locations the user recently has viewed in the pdf. As a way to mitigate getting lost when jumping between locations in a digital document.
[0] https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek#overview
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
8 points · Open discussionI implore all developers of PDF readers to implement sioyek's overview feature[0]. When you hover on a cross-referenced entry, it opens a little preview window with the contents of the reference. It is an absolute game-changer for reading textbooks and technical papers; I cannot overstate its utility.
[0] https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek#overview
In SumatraPDF ReaderSioyek 2.0 – PDF viewer for research papers and textbooks
4 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 32 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.