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SumatraPDF Reader

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Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#161

Post by dizhn »

soco wrote: post #144
dagw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is Adobe doing Probably supporting 100% of the PDF spec. plus addressing all those obscure feature requests that 6 companies in this one very niche industry really really need. Sumatra is fantastic and basically the only PDF reader I use on Windows, but it does have maybe 10% of the features Adobe acrobat has. It is however the 10% that that basically everybody needs.

For me even Sumatra or Foxit have too many features. I only ever open PDFs to read and print, maybe zoom, but all those other buttons there only distract me - if there'd only be a way to hide them... But yeah first world problems. I'm happy they exist.

On Android mupdf mini gives me exactly that with a few implicit features that makes reading pdf books on mobile be 'ok'.

There's a mupdf windows build. Perhaps that will do what you want.

(Mupdf is also a library so there are a lot of different programs with the name in it by various programmers.)

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#162

Post by kjksf »

zerr wrote: post #108
commandersaki wrote: post #27

Great retrospective of SumatraPDF from the author: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfc... .

> The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works. Seems like the author didn't look at cross-platform toolkits since 90s.

(I wrote the post).

That's fair in the sense that I did not look closely at latest Gtk or Qt or WxWidgets.

That being said they certainly did not get lighter.

Last I checked Qt was over 10 MB of libraries). Sumatra is 12 MB and I'm guessing over 8 MB is fonts needed to render PDF documents.

So just Gtk or Qt code would be more than the whole app.

Latest Gtk4 does seem to look nice so maybe calling it ugly was uncalled for.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#163

Post by kjksf »

ykonstant wrote: post #140

I implore all developers of PDF readers to implement sioyek's overview feature[0]. When you hover on a cross-referenced entry, it opens a little preview window with the contents of the reference. It is an absolute game-changer for reading textbooks and technical papers; I cannot overstate its utility. [0] https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek#overview

(I wrote SumatraPDF).

I know about sioyek and been meaning to steal some of their ideas.

Maybe in the next version.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#164

Post by viraptor »

VMG wrote: post #151
viraptor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even once you have a parser itself, actually figuring out what to display and where is... interesting. Especially in generated rather than hand-created documents. What's the element's position? Grab your math library, we're multiplying matrices! What does this text say? Let's write another parser for the table of very custom codepoints!

mapping coordinates via projection matrices pretty common tbh

If you change/transform then on the fly - sure. If they're on a final, not-designed-as-editable format... Not that common. I don't really see any reason (beyond PS origins and its historical usage) for PDFs to not flatten the final positions/sizes.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#165

Post by buchoo »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #8

I have the bad habit of keeping many PDF files in the reader open (yeah, I keep reading long books). The thing is when I open Sumatra for a new file (maybe only for a quick glance) Sumatra will reload all my files and slowed the startup significantly. I wish I can set the option which will load only if I’ve actually switched to the tab, just like Firefox.

The same frustration due to the same bad habit led me to look into implementing lazy loading in SumatraPDF, but unfortunately the code is structured in such a way as to make it a very non-trivial change.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#166

Post by kjksf »

dagw wrote: post #94
ivraatiems wrote: post #79

Wow, I just installed this for the first time and its performance blows both Adobe Reader (not an achievement) and Foxit (something of an achievement) out of the water! Nice work by these devs. And its install footprint is around 10% of those programs. What the hell is Adobe doing, I wonder, that makes their software so unbearably slow and painful to use?

What the hell is Adobe doing Probably supporting 100% of the PDF spec. plus addressing all those obscure feature requests that 6 companies in this one very niche industry really really need. Sumatra is fantastic and basically the only PDF reader I use on Windows, but it does have maybe 10% of the features Adobe acrobat has. It is however the 10% that that basically everybody needs.

(I wrote SumatraPDF).

I agree that Adobe has more features than SumatraPDF.

Not necessarily the PDF spec itself - SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff.

And it's not exactly slow. I'm sure the core rendering of PDF pages is same or faster.

It's just slow to start. Like very, very, sluggish slow. And it's very visible to users.

I don't think it's the features that cause the slow startup. They just don't seem to care about optimizing it.

Chrome has more features that Adobe Reader. It has video calling, a capable PDF viewer and all the other stuff in ever growing web standards.

And yet it starts up fast. Not instant as SumatraPDF but way, way faster than Adobe Reader.

I think that it's more than fair benchmark regarding complexity of the app.

The difference is that Chrome team cares about performance, including startup speed, and they spend a lot of resources on it.

I remember Chrome was counting and removing C++ static initializers from their code (the code that runs before main()) because that contributes to startup speed.

That's the level of care you need to have and I think Adobe just doesn't have it.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#167

Post by a1o »

kjksf wrote: post #162
zerr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works. Seems like the author didn't look at cross-platform toolkits since 90s.

(I wrote the post). That's fair in the sense that I did not look closely at latest Gtk or Qt or WxWidgets. That being said they certainly did not get lighter. Last I checked Qt was over 10 MB of libraries). Sumatra is 12 MB and I'm guessing over 8 MB is fonts needed to render PDF documents. So just Gtk or Qt code would be more than the whole app. Latest Gtk4 does seem to look nice so maybe calling it ugly was uncalle…

Thanks for caring about file size!

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#168

Post by SushiHippie »

PhilippGille wrote: post #154
Helmut10001 wrote: post #128

SumatraPDF is among the OSS PDF tools I use. Since Adobe is pushing a more aggressive stance for monetization of Acrobat, I am trying to replace selected PDF workflows with OSS. Here are some of the tools I use. qpdf removing passwords, unlocking PDFs, conversion install in WSL with apt-get install qpdf remove password with qpdf --decrypt --password="" input.pdf output.pdf PDF4QT - Open Source PDF Editing Deleting, S…

You mention qpdf not available in Chocolatey, but it's available in Scoop, which is another Windows package manager: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/blob/master/bucket/qp...

For other distributions / OS / package managers see here: https://repology.org/project/qpdf/versions

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#169

Post by SushiHippie »

soco wrote: post #144
dagw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is Adobe doing Probably supporting 100% of the PDF spec. plus addressing all those obscure feature requests that 6 companies in this one very niche industry really really need. Sumatra is fantastic and basically the only PDF reader I use on Windows, but it does have maybe 10% of the features Adobe acrobat has. It is however the 10% that that basically everybody needs.

For me even Sumatra or Foxit have too many features. I only ever open PDFs to read and print, maybe zoom, but all those other buttons there only distract me - if there'd only be a way to hide them... But yeah first world problems. I'm happy they exist.

Well there are always the stripped down/simplified gtk/gnome versions

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#170

Post by ed_balls »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #128

SumatraPDF is among the OSS PDF tools I use. Since Adobe is pushing a more aggressive stance for monetization of Acrobat, I am trying to replace selected PDF workflows with OSS. Here are some of the tools I use. qpdf removing passwords, unlocking PDFs, conversion install in WSL with apt-get install qpdf remove password with qpdf --decrypt --password="" input.pdf output.pdf PDF4QT - Open Source PDF Editing Deleting, S…

META: What's the best way to convert pdfs to CSV/excel? Any new LLM tool?
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