221–230 of 276 posts
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…
What's super handy about SumatraPDF is that it will auto reload normal image files if they're modified, so it's an easy way to get some sort of windowed graphics output by saving image files.
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> 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…
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> I became increasingly terrified of making changes. That's the main value of automated tests.
I rarely feel like tests make it easier for me to make changes later. Types do give me that feeling pretty reliably, though.
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?
Great retrospective of SumatraPDF from the author: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfc... .
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…
seek forgiveness rather than permission - gets you launched - gets you better
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(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 cau…
> SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff Sumatra includes a 3D renderer to display embedded CAD models? https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-p...
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
> When you hover on a cross-referenced entry, it opens a little preview window with the contents of the reference. Wikipedia does the same thing, but I assume you would know that. What am I misunderstanding? Also, if it makes your PDF reader execute arbitrary remote code, isn't that a serious risk?
[ducks for cover]