Quickly browse through many PDFs

I am in the same need when I produce multiple plots and graphs (with R typically) that I want to be .pdf for resolution and for LaTeX integration.

I may have 3 suggestions, the 1st being the one I like the most (just found it and really excited about it).

1. impressive

   • Install it:

     sudo apt-get install impressive
     

   • Then, from a terminal in your directory:

     impressive -T0 -w *.pdf
     

   • It will display a presentation of your pdf files. the -T0 option removes transitions (or, equivalently, -t None), and the -w wraps the presentation (you can return to 1st slide from the last one).

     You may want to use the -f switch to avoid starting in fullscreen mode (anyway you can toggle to fullscreen hitting the "f" key).

     For zooming, position your mouse where you want to zoom in, and hit "z".

Now, to relate to your question, it unfortunately doesn't keep the viewing position, and the zoom feature is limited. Otherwise, I believe it is better to use impressive than merging into one file, in terms of memory usage.

2. Here is a quick fix using mupdf and a bash script: Is there a way to quickly browse multiple pdfs in a directory?

3. Otherwise I am just discovering the great Zathura pdf reader, it's highly customizable, I suspect there might be a way to write a plugin and bind keys to switch to the next pdf.