pdf-view-plus

This package provides a PDF viewer for Atom. It is intended to replace pdf-view.

Features

This package integrates Mozilla's PDF.js platform and viewer almost directly into an Atom pane. This gives you the same set of features you find in the Firefox PDF viewer (which also uses PDF.js), and means updates upstream can be easily incorporated.

For package developers, there is also a pdfview service that allows for interacting with open PDFs. The reverse SyncTeX capability of this package works using this service.

Why not pdf-view

The pdf-view package uses the core of PDF.js but with a custom viewer. Among other issues, its viewer at the time of writing loads all pages in memory meaning large PDFs can cause severe performance issues. There is also an undiagnosed memory leak, causing RAM usage to rise with every reloaded PDF. This is not a problem for light use, but it can lead to a crash when frequently reloading PDFs, such as when recompiling LaTeX.

In comparison, the Mozilla viewer loads only visible pages, and has the PDF.js team behind it to patch any memory leaks. Loading only visible pages means they may take a moment to render when randomly accessed, but the overall performance is much better in large files.

Installing

Do this through the Atom settings tab, or on the command line with

apm install pdf-view-plus

Alternatively, you can use apx to install a reduced size version; the apm install is 70MB, while installing via apx is only 7MB.

To install apx, first install npm and then apx with the following command

npm install -g @aerijo/apx

then to install pdf-view-plus run

apx install pdf-view-plus

Developing

1. Clone repo & navigate to repo root
2. Run npm install
3. Run apm link --dev
4. Run npm run watch (keeps TS compiled)
5. Open PDF in dev mode & reload window to test changes each time