Reload a PDF file or save over an opened PDF file

All of the usual PDF viewers that I’ve tried (Adobe Reader, PDF-XChange, …) lock a file opened with them. That is, the file cannot be overwritten until it is closed in the PDF viewer.

This is inconvenient for developing scripts that generate a PDF file, because a developer would like to see changes in the source code reflected in the PDF preview.

The easiest way I’ve found to open a PDF file without locking it, is to use Atom editor with atom-pdf-view plugin. The plugin also auto-reloads the file on update.

I now prefer to use Visual Studio Code for editing code but I still keep Atom open when I work on PDF file generators to preview changes to the generated PDF files almost in real time.

As a side note, that plugin is based on Mozilla’s pdf.js library, so I suspect other previers based on that library would also not lock the file.