PDFView - Forget Command-Plus

Notice

PDFView is no longer in development. Thanks to all the people who supported it, but I have no time any more. You may wanna try Skim as a replacement/improvement.

About

PDFView is a lightweight Mac OS X application to display PDF files.

What does it offers more than Preview?

• By default, the main window will open up maximized, and the zoom level will be automatically the highest possible to fit the document into your screen - so that documents will become finally readable. Especially valuable if you are using a small size screen.
• PDFView supports a powerful full screen mode, and a innovative "presentation" mode, in which nothing is displayed but your document, not even scroll bars. This mode is designed with Beamer user in mind, but not restricted to them. Apple Remote support is also planned, in the future.
• PDFView offers powerful integration with LaTeX:
  • it recognizes when the file is updated on disk and offers to reload it;
  • if you are using the PDFSync LaTeX package, you can switch back and forth between the document and the text editor; just Command-click on a point in the PDF to be taken to the corresponding LaTeX line in your editor (customizable in the preferences);
  • again, if you are using PDFSync, you can set up your editor to jump you to the appropriate page in the PDF (please refer to this page for instructions about it).
• PDFView has a very nice magnification tool: just drag around the document to use it.
• PDFView supports a useful miniature display.

Among other features:

• PDFView lets you view your PDF the way you want: you can rotate pages, choose to display one or two pages at the same time, let it choose the best zoom level or fine-tune it.
• PDFView can be configured to reload, at startup, the document you had open when you closed it, and for each of them it remembers all the display settings you changed, and the page you were viewing.

PDFView is an Universal Binary, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

A few features (hand tool, magnification tool, PDFSync support, some icons) were taken by the excellent TeXShop's source code; parts of the PDFSync support also are based upon TeXniscope.

PDFView currently supports fifteen languages:

• English
• Italian
• Japanese (thanks to E-WA)
• German (thanks to Christoph Schmitz)
• French (thanks to Damien Pollet)
• Swedish (thanks to Henrik Cederblad)
• Brazilian portuguese (thanks to Adhemerval Zanella)
• Traditional chinese (thanks to Lann Chang)
• Simplified chinese (thanks to Lann Chang)
• Korean (thanks to Gord Welch)
• Spanish (thanks to Daniel Salmerón Amselem)
• Danish (thanks to Ola Berger Bungum)
• Norwegian (thanks to Helge André Gudmundsen)
• Russian (thanks to Ilya and Tanya Sherman)
• Dutch (thanks to Robert Klep)

If you want to help translating in another one, just contact me. Your effort will be greatly appreciated.

Known bugs

This is a short list of already known bugs, on which I will start working as soon as my exams will finish. Thanks to all the people who signaled them, and please avoid reporting them again.

• PDFView keeps the file locked, even when the document is closed.
• The resizing behaviour, when toggling the drawer, will be updated in a later release.
• Support for LaTeX projects with more than one input files will be added.
• Requirement for PDFSync will be scrapped, and PDFView will move to the more modern system used by TeXShop.
• Some kind of marking will be added, when opening a specific file in a PDF from a latex source.
• PDFView uses Tiger's default component for displaying PDF files, called "PDFKit". Unfortunately, this component doesn't allow (that I know) features such as "fit to width", "fit to height", "size window to height" and so on. So, please stop asking for those features: I really can't implement them, I am sorry.

News and version history