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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)

#91

Post by kcartlidge »

nickjj wrote: post #35
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 trie…

Not open source, but mp3tag [1] and Notepad++ [2] (which is) would also be on my Windows list. For Mac I'd add MarkEdit [3], which is less than 3MB, carefully feature-scoped, and has a responsive developer behind it.

[1] https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

[3] https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit

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

#92

Post by awry1 »

kjksf wrote: post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

automated crash reporting. Unfortunately it's a pain to build but this is single most important thing you can do to improve quality of your software... On the server, process those files and generate web pages for easy viewing of the crashes. I'm not a developer but I would think sharing what you can of your implementations of these would benefit others as well. i.e. good examples of exception handlers to catch crashes in the app, in crash handler download symbols from the server to get readable callstack, create a crash report that includes callstacks of all thread, program and os information and possibly any implementations of the processing of the files Possibly these are just blog posts intended for the junior developer or actual github repos. Thanks for all your work!

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

#93

Post by haunter »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #71
haunter wrote: post #22

SumatraPDF, JPEGView [0], ShareX [1] are some great Windows open source softwares 0, https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview 1, https://getsharex.com/ ShareX is the nr1 software I wish was available under Linux. It does so much and perfectly. But I guess the whole X11/Wayland + different UI toolkits makes it complicated.

What features of ShareX do you use in practice? I came across it around the end of my Windows usage (a few years ago), and the only thing I really found useful was the Upload feature to get an Imgur (or similar) link.

Making screenshots, screen recording (small gifs or video files), sharing the files, color picking, basic image editing, video converting, OCR from scanned documents. So a lot

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

#94

Post by WhyNotHugo »

I think it makes perfect sense for this to be windows-only, and it wouldn't make sense to make it cross-platform.

Make a PDF library cross platform? Perfect sense. Make a PDF reader cross platform? You'll end up with a mess.

The reader itself is mostly the UI an interacts with the OS's API for rendering and drawing. There's really no way to write one that works on different OSs unless you either have three separate codebases. Or you can hide three separate codebases under some abstraction that makes the application look alien on all supported platforms.

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

#95

Post by WhyNotHugo »

kjksf wrote: post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

I recall using SumatraPDF in its early days. I also worked at the IT department for a university and we started putting it in all PCs. It was fast, reliable and no licensing issues whatsoever.

I use zathura on Linux nowadays, and it like a not-too-distant cousin. It's perhaphs a bit less newbie-friendly, but it shares the same focus on "let's just render things fast and no BS", and also uses mupdf under the hood.

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

#96

Post by eirikbakke »

EarthIsHome wrote: post #53

I've been very happy using SumatraPDF on Windows, because it redraws the PDF after the file has been written over. (This is especially useful with LaTeX on Windows.) When I have the PDF open with Adobe Acrobat, my LaTeX compiler can't write over the open PDF file.

This is exactly my use case for SumatraPDF as well; seamlessly refresh a PDF that's been regenerated from LaTeX.

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

#97

Post by grishka »

kjksf wrote: post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

As someone who now also works on an open-source personal project, I'm really fascinated by this kind of thing. Especially the "I don't care about dogmatic ways of doing things", this very much resonates with me.

As for SumatraPDF, I haven't used it myself because I don't use Windows as my main OS, but I definitely remember seeing that icon on other people's Windows machines. So it is reasonably popular in my part of the world. It also blows my mind that Windows still doesn't come with a proper built-in PDF viewer like macOS does.

Thank you for doing what you're doing! People like you make the world a better place.

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

#98

Post by cvalka »

kjksf wrote: post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

Please fix your printing issue

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

#99

Post by jcpham2 »

I actually remember having to locate SumatraPDF for an attorney's Palm so he could open and view .pdf files from his email.

I don't know if anyone remembers this but Exchange ActiveSync debuted around 2003

Blackberry had their own standalone solution that was a whole slew of Windows services and service accounts integrated with your Exchange server.

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

#100

Post by billfruit »

anta40 wrote: post #62

>> The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk. The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works. So, how you are going to write cross platform apps, then? :D

Java is still viable for many usecases.
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