Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.kowalczyk.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 175 posts

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

#81

Post by hedora »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #34
_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.

This makes sense. PDF is (was originally) a stripped down version of postscript, and postscript ran well on embedded processors by the late 80’s.

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

#82

Post by nyolfen »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #73
nickjj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For me the killer audio player was Winamp. I could hide the window and control everything via keyboard shortcuts. It was the perfect program: completely invisible and yet completely functional.

i think this applies to every audio player software that has ever been developed

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

#83

Post by hedora »

gorjusborg wrote: post #58

I find it interesting that he repeats the mantra 'be like water', which seems to partially equate to 'give users what they want', while also discussing the mozilla/firefox history. It hints at what I think is a natural cycle of software. Software evolves with its user base, its existence and modification over time proving its value. Then, there comes a time where the weight of its history (and feature set) becomes to…

I think the weight comes from expanding teams and developer turnover. Small teams can avoid both these issues.

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

#84

Post by rags2riches »

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 use case led me to Sumatra as well. Haven't used another pdf reader on Windows since.

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

#85

Post by hedora »

Ergo19 wrote: post #65
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

Do like everybody else does and wrap it in a web-browser.

Does wine have the ability to package windows binaries? That would probably be lighter weight, assuming it performed a tree shaking pass.

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

#86

Post by Aloha »

This is exactly the thing I've been looking for!

I have a powershell script that downloads PDF's from a URL, and prints them to a specified printer, I'm using Foxit right now, however there have been substantive changes to foxit, and I'm worried about the free option going away.

I'll for sure check this out.

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

#87

Post by ragazzina »

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…

I would add Everything by VoidTools. It completely changes one's workflow.

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

#88

Post by zczc »

chafporte wrote: post #78
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 add viewing of 2 pages side by side.

Menu(≡) / View / Facing

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

#89

Post by anon9931 »

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 like to have SumatraPDF on every Windows machine I use, because it's so fast and light. And I like that I can easily change the theme via the Advanced Settings text file. It's great! Thanks for your work on it!

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

#90

Post by sph »

acuozzo wrote: post #69
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…

> but paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch I hate to admit this, but I feel the same way when it comes to programmers themselves. I've tried very, very hard to be mindful of this in an effort to correct it, but I still have this gut feeling when I encounter a fellow programmer with the general put-together-ness of someone in the C-suite. What mak…

Likewise, I'd never trust a software engineer in a suit, unless it's for a project written in Java or COBOL.

Nor a sysadmin that isn't wearing black, running Linux and/or listening to metal. Unless they have a white beard, then you know they have been around for a while.

(Just partially serious here, don't read too much into it. But you know it's true.)

Post reply on HN