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Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

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Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#31

Post by badpun »

taneq wrote: post #20
badpun wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed! I’ve switched go Sumatra PDF roughly 5 years ago, after Adobe Reader became just absurdly slow. It’s crazy how a hobbyist can make product that’s vastly better than a multibillion dollar company.

Adobe’s goals for Acrobat Reader are almost diametrically opposed to yours.

Wouldn't it further their goals to make their software not abysmally slow? There can't be any competetive advantage in making something this slow, unless they did it with extremely cheap, unqualified programmers - then you could argue the cost savings were worth it.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#32

Post by mananaysiempre »

tpoacher wrote: post #21

> I learned about how Plan 9 C code had non-traditional scheme of #include files where they don't put #ifdef wrappers in each .h file to allow multiple inclusion and .h files don't include other .h files. As a result .c files have to include every .h file they need and in the right order. It's a bit of a pain and no other modern C++ codebase I know of maintains such discipline. I've always thought this is exactly how…

The problem with this scheme is that adding a dependency to a header now breaks source compatibility (even if nothing new needs to be linked in and a piece of a library just needs to pull in a different piece of itself or even of libc). It’s pretty and clean, but you need an environment that’s friendly to crosscutting changes to handle source-compat breakage. (Such as, yes, a dependency-tree leaf like an end-user application, or a monolithic tree like a traditional Unix.)

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#33

Post by flumpcakes »

taneq wrote: post #20
badpun wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed! I’ve switched go Sumatra PDF roughly 5 years ago, after Adobe Reader became just absurdly slow. It’s crazy how a hobbyist can make product that’s vastly better than a multibillion dollar company.

Adobe’s goals for Acrobat Reader are almost diametrically opposed to yours.

You would think "reading PDFs without annoying the user" should be the first and golden goal. So much software in the modern era has horrible UX because the vendor's goals aren't aligned with the users' goals, where really the users' goals should be the only thing you care about as a company.

At my $DAYJOB you could fire 80% of the R&D staff and refocus efforts onto what our users actually want, and we would probably have a better product which less major incidents. This is for a company only in the ~$100m revenue. Of course, we're not $WEBSCALE so maybe things are different for the $1bn+ revenue companies.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#34

Post by mananaysiempre »

_hao wrote: post #13

This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly. Wish we had more native projects like that!

Notably, the roll-your-own parts do not include core PDF parsing and rendering, which are outsourced to (possibly a fork of?) mupdf.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#35

Post by nickjj »

agubelu wrote: post #2

I use SumatraPDF almost every day and I love it. It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following: - Small and fast - Hand-crafted for a particular platform - Not bloated with oddly specific UI menus and configuration settings It has one job and it does it very well. Thank you for it.

> It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following...

Yep. On Windows there's:

    - IrfanView for image editing
    - foobar2000 for mp3s
They've been on my "must have" install list for ~20 years.

There's also Ditto for managing multiple clipboard entries. It's a good example of how a small open source tool with an optimized UI for 1 thing ends up being 100x better than the same feature MS tried to implement straight into Windows.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#36

Post by netr0ute »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #11

I agree with his points about treating it like commercial software (in terms of having a website/screenshots/etc) but paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch. When you find a utility which has a site that looks like Richard Stallman's website you breathe easily because it's unlikely there's going to be any time-limited trial version, subscription mo…

Although this may be true for you, as shown by SumatraPDF, this is probably a characteristic of only a small demographic.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#37

Post by jasbur »

badpun wrote: post #31
taneq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe’s goals for Acrobat Reader are almost diametrically opposed to yours.

Wouldn't it further their goals to make their software not abysmally slow? There can't be any competetive advantage in making something this slow, unless they did it with extremely cheap, unqualified programmers - then you could argue the cost savings were worth it.

They’re in a de facto monopoly position with Reader, they don’t have to worry about users leaving for a faster product.

Probably, all of their best programmers are working on revenue generators, not performance.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#38

Post by FredPret »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #24
Aisen8010 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sumatra is the best PDF Reader. It's sad that the developer isn't making much money from that excellent product.

Why is it sad? Every time I see a piece of software that provides a lot of value and it’s not focused on money-making (ublock for example) it gives me a warm feeling.

Please forward your warm feelings to his bank account. Perhaps he can live off it

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#39

Post by bluedino »

After Foxit started to imitate the worst parts of Adobe Acrobat Reader, I re-discovered SumatraPDF. What a refreshing piece of software to use, the lack of bullshit is amazing.

Of course, it's blocked at work so I can't use it on my Windows machine.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#40

Post by mikub »

xattt wrote: post #28
agubelu wrote: post #2

I use SumatraPDF almost every day and I love it. It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following: - Small and fast - Hand-crafted for a particular platform - Not bloated with oddly specific UI menus and configuration settings It has one job and it does it very well. Thank you for it.

It’s missing dark mode that other low-key projects have adopted. It’s an app that’s lovely to use, but it sure does give your eyeballs a suntan when it’s open. Yes, there are custom settings you can set, but for simple software, I just want a simple switch.

I actually prefer a textfile to change the colors, especially for a pdf reader I don't like white text on the "#000000" black that a lot of apps use. Instead I use "BackgroundColor = #ECECEC" which is much better for the eyes imho.
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