PDF viewer for research articles that displays the full reference when mousing over a reference

Question

I am looking for a PDF viewer for Microsoft Windows 7 with the following features:

• can display the full reference when mousing over a reference.

E.g. if I mouse over "2014a" in the following screenshot, it should display somewhere the full reference (in this case "Karl Moritz Hermann and Phil Blunsom. 2014b. Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributional Semantics. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Baltimore, USA, June. Association for Computational Linguistics") so that I don't have to scroll down to the reference section.

• can highlight text (and those highlights should be recognizable as highlights by Adobe Acrobat Pro)

Answer 1

I don't think that there is any viewer which can do this on the fly. You might find a Acrobat plug-in developer who might be able to create a plug-in which can recognize the references (2014a), and create a popup with the referenced text. Maybe, but it would most likely be restricted to a predefined format. And it is not sure how much the Reader License would cost for using that plug-in with Adobe Reader.

If you are the author, you might get somewhere by using Framemaker for authoring, and it is possible that you would get a link from the reference to the reference text. Maybe some other authoring tools can do something similar.

It would be possible to process the document in Acrobat with some smart JavaScript… just similar to what the above mentioned plug-in would do. Search for a string matching the reference, locate the reference text, read it in and create a transparent Button field covering the reference which then runs a script displaying the reference text.