this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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I've been having a hard time looking for a pdf viewer that has a specific feature, and have been meaning to ask for a good enough one to use instead.

The feature i was looking for is viewing a directory of files at once without having to open multiple files at once and navigate from tabs, sort of like a file explorer and a pdf viewer in one, which might be a lot to ask.

What I'm asking for right now is what software would you use if you needed to read plenty of pdf files from the same source?

If you don't have anything specific that solves this, I'd still like to know if there is a "good enough" pdf viewer, as the browser doesn't feel like a good enough solution for my problem.

  • Note that i do not need to edit the files, just view them.
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[–] Kissaki@beehaw.org 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Maybe I would

  1. Create a file called pdfs.html
  2. Add embedded PDFs
    <embed src="pdf1.pdf"></embed>
    <embed src="pdf2.pdf"></embed>
    <embed src="pdf3.pdf"></embed>
    
  3. Maybe give it a container div with display grid for min size and useful layout
  4. Open the HTML file in my webbrowser Firefox

To generate the embed codes for every PDF file in a folder I would use my command line shell Nushell, which generates the embeds for all files for me.

ls *.pdf | each {|x| $'<embed src="($x.name)"></embed>'} | str join