Home / Multiple Windows, Single PDF [Update - Now easily available in 3.2]

As a science major, I greatly appreciate Sumatra for accessing my text books. Often I’ll find myself flipping between the front and the back of the textbook to move between problems and solutions, or taking a windows ‘snip’ of the solutions section. Alternatively, I sometimes make two copies of a text book in order to view the solutions and problems simultaneously.

To the request: allow multiple instances of a single PDF to be opened in separate tabs, ideally by selecting the current tab and clicking a “clone tab” option.

Split window and multiple windows with tab mode have been requested since 2011 if not earlier. Here are the main relevant issues and you can also see the many others linked to from them, including from back when the project was hosted on Google Code:

I am silly. This is already possible. For some reason I was under the impression that Sumatra would switch to the already opened PDF as opposed to opening a new tab and displaying the same file. This feature is already available.

there is a reuse instance feature which is intended to deliberately reload the one copy for latex compilation when it jumps from location to location in the same document. it is possible to use some of those features for program control of two locations thus start one copy on page 2 and the other say on page 24 but then you need some management to control the opening of the two copies

Does Sumatra support the feature of split view, as available for instance in Adobe Acrobat Pro, which allows one to view two different parts of the document simultaneously, e.g. body and references in an article? Thanks!

By default using tabs means that clicking on a file will reopen that tab,

If tabs are off then clicking a file twice will open a second window.

There are ways to call a file with a given page number, thus if you have a list of frequent pages you can be rolling through one part of a file whilst jumping between other pages

At its most basic this is a good use for the “favourites” list when bookmarks have not been added by the author.

Thank you. I am not sure I understand your response. However, it gave me a tip that partly solves my problem: I see that SumatraPDF allows to open multiple instances of the document, which may be accessed from tabs. I can then have two instances = two tabs, and quickly flip from one instance to the other through the tabs to quickly access both documents. This is not so good as the Acrobat reader, which allows one to simultaneously view two part of the file with a split in the center (e.g. text body on top subwindow, and references on bottom subwindow).

In options switch off tabs then you can have 2 windows to “snap” to half screen

[Update]

In version 3.2 onwards there is a new option using CTRLSHIFTN which opens the current file in a new window then use windows to snap side by side or one over the other or move one to a separate screen

Alternately open a second window via File > New window then load the last file or any other from frequently read (including pinned) or the file pull down list

might I split screen in two or more in one PDF file how in WORD?

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Split screen was virtually possible in some special versions or configurations a Long Long time ago but now difficult to reproduce due to changes in systems since then. It may at a push be possible usin NPAPI in Waterfox. but I have not tried in recent years.

The best current option is to use CTRLSHIFTN