Is there a pdf viewer capable of opening multiple documents in the same window?

qpdfview is a lightweight tabbed document viewer that should suit your needs.

It's in the default Ubuntu and Debian repos. More recent versions can be found in the following PPAs:

• release versions

• daily builds

• experimental builds for Ubuntu 12.04 with backported poppler

Using zathura with tabbed might help here:

Tabbed provides a "simple generic tabbed fronted to xembed aware applications" and zathura is a simple PDF viewer that is XEmbed-aware.

A much more heavyweight approach would be letting a browser provide the tabbing while having the chapters displayed using plugins, e.g. using mozplugger (even with evince) or using PDF.js (both working with Firefox).

Regarding the all-mighty Okular, there's a wishlist item and a workaround using konqueror (like the heavyweight option above).

However, were you to use a window manager that supports tabbed layouts, e.g. i3, notion or XMonad (there might be more!), any lightweight PDF-viewer (xembed'able or not) could work just fine. You'd just open several windows in a tabbed window manager layout (details vary with the actual WM) -- like @Marco suggested in his comment.

I would recommend just setting PDFs to open in Firefox (or Chrome) at this point.

In GNOME Nautilus, this can be done using Properties -> Open With.

Unfortunately, the GNOME Evince document viewer maintainers have made it clear they aren't going to add tabbed viewing support.