sioyek
Sioyek is a free, open-source PDF viewer designed specifically for academic documents like research papers and textbooks. It emphasizes rapid navigation, annotation, and cross-referencing features tailored to scholarly workflows. The application lets users highlight, bookmark, and manage notes across multi-page documents, making it popular with students, researchers, and academics who regularly work with PDF-based literature.
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1 suggestionSioyek is actively maintained open-source software, but official prebuilt releases for macOS have not been published for over two years. The project's development branch includes support for ARM64 (Apple Silicon) architectures, but there is no official native app bundle readily available from the vendor. If you need to use Sioyek on Apple Silicon, you will need to build it from source using the instructions available on the project's GitHub repository — the process requires Homebrew, Python, and Qt, but is well-documented. Alternatively, the Intel build continues to work under Rosetta 2 today. However, as Apple is removing Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 (September 2028), you should either contact the project maintainers to request native release binaries or plan to rebuild from source before that deadline. For users who prefer a prebuilt native alternative, consider PDF Expert, Skim (an open-source PDF viewer with native Apple Silicon support), or Preview (macOS's built-in PDF viewer, which has native support but fewer academic-focused features).
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