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SumatraPDF Reader

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Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#171

Post by kjksf »

user3939382 wrote: post #23

Bless the heart of whoever looked at the PDF spec and said to themselves, "Nice, I'd like to writer a parser for this."

(I wrote SumatraPDF).

In fairness, I didn't write the PDF rendering. That is indeed quite a tall order.

I used to use poppler and switched to mupdf (was more active at the time, poppler seems to have picked up pace since).

The core PDF feature set isn't that bad to implement.

From what I've seen, the bad / complex parts are:

- stuff they added years later, like some XML stuff (of course you had to add XML in 2000!), JavaScript in forms

- some more complex vector graphics features like masking with vectors, support for bunch of color spaces, cmyk separation

- font handling, text rendering is surprisingly complex

- rendering fast even if PDF was badly created

- PDF is easy to screw up when you create it and boy, do people screw up in every imaginable way. You can't just say "it's bad PDF" when Adobe or Chrome opens it so a lot of effort by mupdf devs is adding heuristics to show even broken PDF docs

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#172

Post by kjksf »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #81

I have been using Sumatra for years and my only issue is that it sometimes takes a _very_ long time to get it to start printing a complex document (at least on Windows). I still keep Adobe Reader around just for printing.

(I wrote SumatraPDF).

Yes, printing is not great. Actively considering making it better, maybe in next version.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#173

Post by kjksf »

Sakos wrote: post #135
quyleanh wrote: post #18

The big update of SumatraPDF was out yesterday [1]. There are a lot of bugs fix and improvement in the backlog [2]. [1] https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/releases/tag/... [2] https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/issues/3672

Did they ever fix the issues around printing? I always ended up using a different PDF viewer just because of that.

(I wrote SumatraPDF).

Not yet but I'm thinking about how to improve it. Maybe next version.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#174

Post by V1ndaar »

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

Evince does the same. It's a great feature, I agree.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#175

Post by cs3f16 »

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

Thank you so much for sharing this extremely amazing software! I hope it gains more popularity and traction.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#176

Post by SushiHippie »

urlwolf wrote: post #107
aragonite wrote: post #65

Sumatra is great, though occasionally I wish it were possible to have something like Firefox's wrapped scrolling [1] where more than 2 pages can be shown side by side. On a reasonably large monitor, being able to quickly zoom out to see e.g. 30 pages (sometimes all the pages of a journal article) at the same time can be very useful. You can be on p. 20, then go and quickly look up a definition on p.2, then frictionle…

Love this view. I can't get pdf display on FF to invert colors. Is there a way? Then it would replace okular for me (which also does this overview mode)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1281116

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#177

Post by sundarurfriend »

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.

Have you tried Zathura: https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/index.html ?

It looks like it's Linux only (I only have Linux so I hadn't checked before), but when I want to sit down and properly read something, the keyboard-centric UI and minimalism make it a really smooth and frictionless experience.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#178

Post by xinayder »

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 can also use Okular to open and edit PDFs, it's the document viewer from KDE.

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#179

Post by signaru »

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…

The reason I never had to install Adobe Reader for more than a decade now is that Sumatra was/is such a tiny install. Thanks!

Edit: I just checked and Acrobat Reader requires 450/900/380 MB for Win32/Win64/Mac respectively [1]. One might argue that it does more than just read PDFs. But in many cases, reading PDFs is all that I need.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/reader/system-requirements.html

Re: SumatraPDF Reader

#180

Post by VHRanger »

kjksf wrote: post #160
mvonballmo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the retrospective. > And yet I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without tests, because I did it. > I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without anyone looking over your code, because I did it. > If no one uses your app then who cares if it crashes. > If many people use your app and it crashes, they’ll tell you and then you’ll fix it. Those four statements are…

(I wrote that blog post). What I was trying to say is: there's dogma about tests and code reviews. At Google you would get fired for suggesting skipping code review. Even at smaller Silicon Valley companies (smaller == less than 10 devs) it's unthinkable to not do code reviews. I haven't worked outside SV so it might be different. That's the dogma. My point is that maybe we should apply a bit of common sense on top o…

The problem with tests is the TDD dogma, which wastes time and makes code harder to change (because even reasonable changes break a bunch of tests).

There's a good rule of testing top level behaviors described in this talk [1]

For code reviews, it's about knowledge handoff. No one disputes you can write great code alone. The problem is that singular geniuses writing functional but unmaintainable code only they understand and then getting hit by a bus or changing jobs is a real issue.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ05e7EMOLM

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