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Hover-Legend Viewer

Guide

How to enable hover-legend overlays in PDF readers — setup guide

All PDF Reading
What is Hover-Legend?

Hover-Legend is a technique where hovering your cursor over a figure in a PDF reveals a floating overlay showing the figure legend — so you don't have to scroll back and forth between the figure and its caption.

This feature requires a browser extension or a specialised PDF reader. It cannot be implemented as a web-only tool.

Option 1 — Adobe Acrobat
Desktop
  1. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.
  2. Go to View → Page Display → Single Page Continuous.
  3. Use Edit → Find to navigate to the figure caption, then right-click → Create Link to manually link captions to figure locations.
  4. Save the annotated PDF for reuse.

Note: Acrobat does not provide hover overlays natively — links are the closest equivalent.

Option 2 — Zotero + ZotFile
Desktop
  1. Install Zotero 6 and the ZotFile plugin.
  2. Open the PDF in Zotero's built-in reader.
  3. Highlight a figure, right-click → Add Note. The note appears in the right panel and can contain the legend text.
  4. Use the note sidebar to view the legend without leaving your reading position.
Option 3 — Chrome/Firefox Extension
Browser
  1. Install the ScholarlyPDF or Lean Libraryextension for your browser.
  2. Open a PDF in the browser. Some extensions automatically detect figures and attach floating legend overlays.
  3. Hover over a figure element to trigger the overlay.

Extension availability varies. Check the respective extension stores for the latest compatible versions.