I am using zathura, as I enjoy its minimalist approach, but I would also switch to mupdf or anything else if this would solve my problem. I need to highlight every word (in PDF and epub documents) one by one from start to finish because I can concentrate better on the text if I have some kind of motion in it. My approach would have been to perform a regex search that matches every word, but neither zathura nor mupdf support regex in searches. Is there a way to do this? I would try to fork zathura but to be honest I don't really want to spend that amount of time if there is another minimal Gnu/Linux compatible document viewer that does what I need. And if there is any way to use terminal tools like pdfgrep for highlighting the results in zathura that would also do the job.

When viewing PDFs that are setup for print, I often want to view facing page spreads. Typically PDFs are typeset such that the first page of the file/part/chapter always starts on a right page so facing page spreads are always even-odd number pairs. Unfortunately Zathura's "dual" display mode shows everything in odd-even pairs starting with 1-2. Is there some way to setup display of facing-pages much the way most PDF readers default to in 2-up modes?

I am trying to enable the smooth scrolling feature in Zathura. I have the following line in my zathurarc: set smooth-scroll true, but the scrolling doesn't become smooth. According to the documentation: > smooth-scroll > > Defines if scrolling via touchpad should be smooth(only available with gtk >= 3.4). I have gtk 3.22 installed (which is greater than 3.4, right?) as dpkg -s libgtk-3-0|grep '^Version' gives me Version: 3.22.4-1. What do I need to do in order to enable smooth scroll? The "via touchpad" part is also suspicious, but I can't get it to work on either a touchpad, a scrollwheel or with the keyboard. Another suspicious thing is that it does not autocomplete when I type :set sm which it does with other options.

I'm usually using the wonderful document viewer 'zathura' for reading PDF-files. Typically, for some documents, the first page of the document is slightly larger than the rest (for example, a photograph of a book cover). In this case the 'best-fit' function (key 'a') of zathura always adjusts the zoom relative to the first page of the document, implying that for the rest of the document the pages are displayed smaller than they should be. This is particularly annoying when reading documents in 'double-page mode', leading to results as terrible as the following: **My Question:** Is there any way to change this behaviour such that the 'best-fit' function adjusts the size relative to the currently viewed page?

I want to configure my Zathura so that when I open a document automatically the size of the page of pdf adjusts to the size of the window. **Practical example** If i close the Zathura like this: When i open it again it stays the same size. I want that when I open it again it automatically adjusts to the width of the window regardless of what state it had previously. An example of what I mean is when you press the "s" it automatically adjusts to the entire window. I tried this in zathurarc but doesn't work. Even with "width" but it does nothing regardless of the option I tried changing colors and worked so I know that zathura is reading the file correctly. set adjust-open "best-fit" Thx.

Running Zathura 0.5.4, when opening a pdf that has mixed page orientation (some pages landscape, some portrait), Zathura will not correctly display the pages. It will stick with whatever the first page is, and when it comes to a page with different orientation, simply cut off the content that doesn't fit. Is it possible to fix this?

I like Zathura as a PDF reader quite a lot, but one feature I haven't found that I miss from other PDF readers is an easy way to open a file from within Zathura. The only way I know how to do this is by issuing an :open command, but to use that command I need to know the full path of the file I want to open (unless it's already in Zathura's history, in which case I can tab to it.) I typically end up just finding the file in the Shell, and then issuing the Zathura command from within the directory of the file I want to open. My question is, is there a better way to find a file from within Zathura itself (maybe something like :Explore in Vim?)

I am currently using Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome Desktop. My pdf app is zathura and currently using tmux. I was wondering is it possible to show pdf file in another pane in tmux?

I am on an Arch Linux machine and okular is probably the best pdf viewer, except just one lacking feature which is restoring tabs when you reopen Okular. Now since there is no default option for doing it, and while I can always make a feature request, I was hoping for some easy out of the box solution, if there is any. I am using bspwm window manager. If there is some window manager route then probably the same can be done for zathura too. I think zathura doesn't have a restore tab option either since it doesn't have a tab option. I am using zathura tabs through [tabc](https://www.reddit.com/r/bspwm/comments/pfajrd/bsptab_tabs_in_bspwm_with_tabbed/) .

I'm using Zathura document viewer and I wanted to have some support for PDF annotations, I'm using the ZATHURA-PDF-MUPDF and as far as I know mypdf has support for PDF annotations, but yet Zathura doesn't. I need some way to enable that in zathura, is there some plugin that I can use to achieve that?

I love zathura to read my PDF but there is an important feature I am missing. How can I open a copy on the current file (in another instance of zathura)? Thanks for your help! **Update (solution):** For my version of zathura (zathura 0.5.2), I just need to add the line

map  exec "zathura $FILE"

In .config/zathura/zathurarc I thanks renzev whose commentary helped me a lot to find this solution!

With zathura 0.4, I get a scrambled display when I maximize the window; it then looks like this (zooms the *content* of the page, but doesn't adjust page borders. It also freezes navigation): [![zathura display problem]]] This happens regardless of the file format of the document. I use Fluxbox as window manager. On the positive side, it does not happen when I open the same document the second time (i.e. the document has an entry in ~/.local/share/zathura/history). Still it is an extremely annoying situation. I haven't found it mentioned as a bug anywhere.

I am trying to get the full path of every PDF that I have opened in the zathura viewer. I know it is possible, since with rofi -show window, I can see the full path. I have tried running ps -p $(pgrep zathura) -o command however, that only displays part of the name, depending on where I was, when I opened the PDF. It gets worse, when I use Vimtex, as in that case, it would display something like zathura -x /usr/bin/nvim --headless -c "VimtexInverseSearch %{line} '%{input}'" --synctex-forward 224:1:/Path/to/part.tex main.pdf where main.pdf need not be in the same place as part.tex (this happens if you use \include etc.). Once gain, rofi does it right! I could probably write a "convoluted" script that would search recursively in every parent directory of the part.tex file to find the main.pdf file... Does anyone know how rofi does it? Or more to the point, how I can do it? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am using the X11 server Arch Linux, 6.2.8-arch1-1 GNU bash, Version 5.1.16 Rofi Version: 1.7.5 Zathura version 0.5.2 Thanks all.

Yesterday, while writing an answer to [How to get full path names of all opened pdf files (in zathura) - like rofi does](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/741457/how-to-get-full-path-names-of-all-opened-pdf-files-in-zathura-like-rofi-does) , I noticed something weird about the ownership of files the /proc/PID/ directory for zathura processes - **most of them are owned by root instead of the user (cas) I ran zathura as**. For example:

$ cd ~/Manuals
$ zathura X399\ Taichi.pdf &
 4055396

$ ls -lF /proc/4055396/fd
ls: cannot open directory '/proc/4055396/fd': Permission denied
$ ls -lFd /proc/4055396/fd
dr-x------ 2 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 /proc/4055396/fd/

huh? why is that owned by root? I ran it as cas. Most, but not all of the files/dirs in /proc/4055396 are owned by root:

$ ls -lF /proc/4055396
ls: cannot read symbolic link '/proc/4055396/cwd': Permission denied
ls: cannot read symbolic link '/proc/4055396/root': Permission denied
ls: cannot read symbolic link '/proc/4055396/exe': Permission denied
total 0
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 arch_status
dr-xr-xr-x  2 cas  cas  0 Mar 31 13:04 attr/
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 autogroup
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 auxv
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 cgroup
--w-------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 clear_refs
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:02 cmdline
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 comm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 coredump_filter
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 cpu_resctrl_groups
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 cpuset
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 cwd
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 environ
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:02 exe
dr-x------  2 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 fd/
dr-xr-xr-x  2 cas  cas  0 Mar 31 13:04 fdinfo/
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 gid_map
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 io
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 ksm_merging_pages
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 ksm_stat
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 limits
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 loginuid
dr-x------  2 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 map_files/
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 maps
-rw-------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 mem
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 mountinfo
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 mounts
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 mountstats
dr-xr-xr-x 57 cas  cas  0 Mar 31 13:04 net/
dr-x--x--x  2 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 ns/
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 numa_maps
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 oom_adj
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 oom_score
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 oom_score_adj
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 pagemap
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 patch_state
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 personality
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 projid_map
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 root
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 sched
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 schedstat
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 sessionid
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 setgroups
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 smaps
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 smaps_rollup
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 stack
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:02 stat
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 statm
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 status
-r--------  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 syscall
dr-xr-xr-x  6 cas  cas  0 Mar 31 13:04 task/
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 timens_offsets
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 timers
-rw-rw-rw-  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 timerslack_ns
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 uid_map
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Mar 31 13:04 wchan

zathura is NOT setuid root:

$ type -p zathura
/usr/bin/zathura

$ ls -l /usr/bin/zathura
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 305456 Nov 28 03:34 /usr/bin/zathura

It is version 0.5.2, and the package was last upgraded on November 28 last year:

$ zathura --version
zathura 0.5.2
girara 0.3.7 (runtime: 0.4.0)
(plugin) cb (0.1.10) (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zathura/libcb.so)
(plugin) pdf-poppler (0.3.1) (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zathura/libpdf-poppler.so)
(plugin) ps (0.2.7) (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zathura/libps.so)
(plugin) djvu (0.2.9) (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/zathura/libdjvu.so)

$ dpkg -l zathura
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=============================================
ii  zathura        0.5.2-1      amd64        document viewer with a minimalistic interface

$ ls -l /var/cache/apt/archives/zathura_0.5.2-1_amd64.deb 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 175712 Nov 28 04:41 /var/cache/apt/archives/zathura_0.5.2-1_amd64.deb

If I use qpdfview, atril, or okular instead of zathura, the permissions are fine:

$ qpdfview X399\ Taichi.pdf 
$ pgrep qpdfview
4071588 qpdfview X399 Taichi.pdf
$ ls -lFd /proc/4071588/fd
dr-x------ 2 cas cas 0 Mar 31 13:16 /proc/4071588/fd/

$ atril X399\ Taichi.pdf &
 4080297
$ ls -lFd /proc/4080297/fd
dr-x------ 2 cas cas 0 Mar 31 13:20 /proc/4080297/fd/

$ okular X399\ Taichi.pdf &
 4081710
$ ls -lFd /proc/4081710/fd
dr-x------ 2 cas cas 0 Mar 31 13:21 /proc/4081710/fd/

All of the above were run from the same instance of bash, same environment, same everything. Not in a VM or container, or anything "unusual". So, what is up with zathura? Is it zathura? or is it some weird namespaces related behaviour by systemd or cgroups or something like that? The system is running Debian sid (updated yesterday), with kernel Linux hex 6.1.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.15-1 (2023-03-05) x86_64 GNU/Linux. The last reboot was 14 days ago when I upgraded the kernel, has been running fine since then. --- NOTE: I vaguely recall that when I was working on my answer yesterday, I saw the same root ownership thing for ONE of the instances of running atril, but I can't replicate that now. I may have mis-remembered this, it was very late at night (> 3am) and I was tired. zathura, however, consistently has root-owned stuff in /proc/PID/ - every time I run it.

Some PDFs include metadata about their pages as to the real page number. For instance C1 for the cover page and roman numerals for the preface. Zathura displays these just fine, but right now commands like :1 goes to the cover page, i.e. absolute page 1, and I'd like to be able to go to the page whose metadata says it's page 1 (rather than C1) and fallback to absolute page numbers if no metadata is available. Is this possible?

While I was trying to install mupdf backend for Zathura, I accidentally did pip install zathura (in user mode) as Meson build kept complaining about a missing dependency, and now the executable path for zathura is now ~/.local/bin/zathura instead of /usr/bin/zathura. I tried uninstalling the wrong program with pip (as well as uninstall/reinstall the correct zathura package), but it still complains about the wrong executable path. It's possible to set it back using an alias (e.g. alias zathura="/usr/bin/zathura"), but I'd rather not do that unless that's exactly how it works behind the scenes. Is there another way to change the executable path?

Is there a variable similar to $FILE or % to get the current page number from Zathura? I'm trying to write a script to generate a text/markdown file with annotations from the pdf I'm reading. It would be executed using the :exec function. I'd like it to write the page where the annotation was made, like: Page 1 - "Annotation" Page 3 - "Another annotation" Is it possible?

I recently switched from Debian to Arch. Now I have a newer version of zathura, which displays the pages continuously. For poppler as well as mupdf, I need the discrete display mode. Is this fixed now? I can't find an option to change this behaviour.

I'm using Zathura (using the MuPDF plugin ) to review various layouts for printing. It's important to me that I'm looking at things approximately the same size as they will come out on paper. I realize the difference between screen pixels and how things look in print will still affect perception, but to save test prints while I rough out margins and trim sizes I want to be able to hold up a paper to the screen and have it match the canvas in my PDF viewer. Zathura's default zoom level (100%) is anything but actual size. In fact it's off by almost ⅓. If I set the zoom to 133% I get something very close to actual size. **How do I make this the default zoom level?** I would like everything else to scale against that so that 50% is actually half size, etc. Is there a way to calibrate the settings to my monitors—some sort of scale factor setting perhaps? Interestingly, Evince seems to know something about my monitor size because it scales things exactly right out of the box. 100% turns up on my monitor as exactly the right paper size (actually it's off by a smidgen, 100.5% is more like it but it would be close enough). On the other hand Acroread is off by a mile, but in the opposite direction as Zathura. There, a value of 87% works out about right—actual-size is actually jumbo scale. How does Zathura decide what size to show at all? Is there a way to fix this so 100% is actually actual-size? Is there a system DPI value that can be set that will calibrate this?

Long time user of zathura since it really is 'lightweight' in that there are no extraneous features. However, I often find myself running out of memory due to having several pdf's open at once. From htop: VIRT RES SHR S Command 1171M 266M 41116 S zathura --config-dir=/tmp/tmp.asdfj a-pdf.pdf 1171M 266M 41116 S zathura --config-dir=/tmp/tmp.asdfj a-pdf.pdf 1171M 266M 41116 S zathura --config-dir=/tmp/tmp.asdfj a-pdf.pdf 1171M 266M 41116 S zathura --config-dir=/tmp/tmp.asdfj a-pdf.pdf For some reason opening a single pdf (a-pdf in this case) results in four instances of zathura running, and they all use around 250M, which does not seem right at all. Why are there four instances for one pdf? Killing the instance will recover around 1G of memory.