Sunday, October 18, 2009

Duplicate tab function in Adobe READER 9.1 is very handy

In reading a scientific paper, one often needs to jump back and forth for referred to tables, figures and references, etc. Those days, PDF is the standard way to share an e-document, and Acroread is the norm to view its content. I used to open two copies of the same document in two instances of Acroread (or one Acroread, one xpdf) so I can read continuously in one while moving around in the other, mostly at the end for references. This works, but obviously less than ideal.

One day, purely by chance, I (mouse) right-clicked the tab for the document I was viewing, and noticed that it popped up with two options: Detach Tab and Duplicate Tab. Clicking Duplicate Tab led to duplication of the same document in another tab. Actually, this process can be repeated more than once, thus allowing for multiple views of the same document simultaneously. Very neat!

Nowadays, whenever I read a scientific publication in Acroread, I often duplicate tab to have two views. It is only a click away to switch between the two. Thus when a citation is referred to in the main text, I can immediately see at the reference section what it is about.

A word of caution: I am using Ubuntu 9.04, with Acroread v9.1.2 05/25/2009. I have no idea from which version and on what platform such function was added.

2 comments:

  1. No, as you guessed, that can never happen under Microsoft Windows environment.

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  2. Thanks for sharing the info that the Duplicate Tab trick does not work in MS Windows. I've just tried Adobe Reader 9.3.0 on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), no luck either.

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