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When I study, I often need to have many books open at the same time, so I can search simultaneously. Having 20 diferent Adobe Acrobat windows open, however, is highly impractical, and things often crash.

When viewing DJVUs with for example WinDJView, I can have all the files open in a single window. This is, from what I understand, not possible for PDFs with Adobe Acrobat.

What would be a similar kind of software for viewing PDFs, but that it involves MDI (multiple document interface)?

P.S. if anyone besides me wishes for MDI option in Adobe Acrobat, report here.

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You can enable tab-browsing with Adobe Reader: Edit > Preferences > Documents > Open documents in tabs. At least this works with Reader 9.4.x under Linux. – Martin Scharrer♦ Oct 21 '11 at 0:49
Hmm, I didn't find that option in my AA Reader; I have Windows. – Leon Lampret Oct 21 '11 at 1:25

closed as off topic by lockstep, Andrew Stacey, diabonas, Joseph Wright♦ Oct 21 '11 at 20:12

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1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

All on Windows:

Adobe spawns multiple windows, however it is all one program; Launching a new window doesn't reopen the program. Changing the interface would not solve any crashing problems, it would just change what the front end looks like. You can see this by opening a bunch of PDFs then hitting Task Manager; Not there will be only 1 AcroRd32.exe process- One program just spawns multiple windows. This actually greatly improves the performance of the program as it allows it to use OS window management, instead of having to re-implement it.

Try upgrading; I regularly have 20+ PDFs open on Win7 with no issues. Make sure you are using the latest version and disable all the plugins, browser integration, etc.

Finally, I'd be in favour of migrating this to a different, more relevant SX site.

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I would still very much like to find a PDF reader with MDI option. There is a list of PDF viewers here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF_software but I don't know which ones support MDI. Any suggestions? – Leon Lampret Oct 21 '11 at 19:30
Not really, MDI is a highly outdated UI for a variety of reasons; The only software I can think of that uses it is Photoshop, though I could be wrong. Rootless windowing and tabbed interfaces have really replaced this. – Canageek Oct 21 '11 at 19:36
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Maybe try PDF XChange Viewer. I use it to view multiple documents in tabs and search through all of them on my work machines with windows. – Ariel Oct 29 '11 at 19:12
Yesss, thank you very much @Ariel; this solves my problem. – Leon Lampret Nov 1 '11 at 21:20

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