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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

> Generously large page margins.

You know how awful large margins are if you have a PDF and a screen that isn’t large enough to display the full page at a readable size? You want to display one page at a time so j and k or Left and Right or whatever work to go to the next page rather than messing around with scrolling, but this actually means that you want to crop every page to throw away the ridiculously large margins, and most PDF viewers don’t support doing that. (To make it worse, add unbalanced left/right margins.)

I wish for a world where document formats don’t support page margins at all, in favour of choosing margins at display or print time. (Yes, I know that at the extremes this starts to conflict with static pagination which is sometimes even more valuable, but humour me anyway in contemplating what you’d change in such a world.)

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I _think_ you want a feature where the reader removes any margins in the document for display. Basically, a "crop the paper format" function. And... yeah, I'd want my reader to have that! (And my Kindle! When sometimes reading a PDF, this would be great!) Does any PDF reader support something like that?

I think I’ve seen it on some desktop PDF software before, though I can’t think what, and the reMarkable can do it.

GoodReader on iPad has this (though you set it for the document manually). It even lets you choose a different view-time crop for odd and even page numbers.

For Android, Librera is able to do that.

On Android, KOReader is able to do this (and free and open source). It can even reflow the text quite well so that it fits on a smaller display like a phone, if needed.

Skim pdf is a good option if you're on macOS: https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

In emacs with pdf-tools it seems you can enable a minor mode:

pdf-view-auto-slice-minor-mode

which does the trick. Just learned it.

EDIT: could try it. Exactly as intended. Will be of great help (I can now have a complete latex page in view with decent font size).

Okular (Linux/Windows) can do this

The ReMarkable tablet supports this natively. And, IIUC, the purpose of the margins is for notes; the ReMarkable also supports inserting blank pages into a pdf for note taking.

I've been using https://pypi.org/project/pdfCropMargins/ (and reporting bugs which have been fixed) to pre-crop my PDF files, so they work on all readers. I haven't tried PDF reflowing yet though.

Okular trims margins like that. It's not perfect with scans, and page numbers can bring them back though.

Besides the automatic trim margins option in Okular, you can also set custom margins to trim unwanted stuff.

> most PDF viewers don’t support doing that

Acrobat Reader does, while also supporting continuous vertical scrolling and cropping out the space between pages (you’ll still have the page margins). You can then just PgUp/PgDn through the entire document. I believe there are other readers supporting similar modes.

The only problem is documents that use significantly different margins for even and odd pages.

What is much worse is PDFs with multiple columns per page.

> To make it worse, add unbalanced left/right margins.

Along with headers/footers and any number of other features which can make automatic cropping difficult. I tend to read PDFs on KOReader, which is quite good at allowing the reader to zoom in on the page and follow the flow of the text, even on multicolumn documents. Yet there are undeniably limits to what it can do.

More often than not I want a “increase margin” rather than crop margin. iOS Safari and Preview even on 12.9” iPad do not support shrink the page less than device width. Large margin makes my life comfortable.

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