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

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

#91

Post by Multicomp »

approxim8ion wrote: post #13

Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility. I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.

Big kudos to the author for not getting sucked into the Electron Maelstrom. I find it so interesting that fancy MVU style Elm web UI event loops etc. all just reinvent the message loop that Windows has used since Win95.

My PDF journey went from Adobe to Foxit to Firefox to SumatraPDF to Okular.

I chose Okular over SumatraPDF because it does form fills and saves said form fill data to a new PDF. (Sumatra may do form fills now, IDK)

I never would have tried Ocular if I wasn't on Fedora KDE, Sumatra was good enough, and I just fell back to FF when I had to do form fills (then print via CutePDF).

Now that Okular is just a 'choco install okular' away from having it on Windows as well as Linux, I get application consistency, form-fills that save modified PDF files, and annotation stuff.

But for Grandma? SumatraPDF it is.

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

#92

Post by TonyTrapp »

SumatraPDF is my absolutely favourite PDF reader, but I wish the author took security more seriously. At least for a long while there were no official releases for months, if not years, with known crashes in muPDF (for which I think known exploits and patches existed), but since SumatraPDF used a custom muPDF version, it required manual patching. Maybe things are better these days (I see updates are more frequent again), but with PDFs being a big attack vectors these days, it leaves a bit of a sour aftertaste.

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

#94

Post by criddell »

burself wrote: post #90
criddell wrote: post #63

> The future of all software is as a web app. Why not bring the spirit of SumatraPDF to the web? That feels like a 180 after reading a couple thousand words extolling the virtues of small, fast code with minimal dependencies.

I think "spirit of SumatraPDF" means that he wouldn't npm install 800K lines of code into his project 5 minutes after creating it. I look at the speed and efficiency of VSCode and it gives me hope that it's possible to write the high quality programs that we're used to from C/C++ using web technologies. It's just that right now we don't have enough good programmers creating good programs to incentivize the others to…

I don't know that VSCode is a great example. I just started it and SublimeText and VSCode takes an order of magnitude more memory. If I watch the Task Manager as I type into each, VSCode also uses about 10x as much CPU which translates into worse battery consumption.

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

#95

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

dataflow wrote: post #80

Any chance it'll use subpixel smoothing one day? Grayscale smoothing makes me want to tear my eyes out. It's the main thing that prevents me from ever switching.

I see comments like this sometimes and wonder if people are born with super eyes or something and I missed out. I only notice the difference between the various HD standards and standard def if they're put right next to each other, don't even bother owning a monitor with >1920x1080, etc.

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

#96

Post by dataflow »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #95
dataflow wrote: post #80

Any chance it'll use subpixel smoothing one day? Grayscale smoothing makes me want to tear my eyes out. It's the main thing that prevents me from ever switching.

I see comments like this sometimes and wonder if people are born with super eyes or something and I missed out. I only notice the difference between the various HD standards and standard def if they're put right next to each other, don't even bother owning a monitor with >1920x1080, etc.

I promise you it's just as baffling to me that some people don't notice it! It seems clear as day to me and I don't even have great eyesight. Maybe it's something like font kerning where it's hard to notice but also hard to un-notice?

Here's an example, can you not see the difference in sharpness clearly?

- Sumatra (grayscale): https://i.imgur.com/wOP8hdX.png

- Acrobat (subpixel): https://i.imgur.com/YXRy1WJ.png

(NOTE: Make sure you're viewing just the unscaled image by itself. You can download each and view it in a 1:1 pixel viewer to sure your browser isn't scaling it. Or run document.body.style.zoom = 1 / window.devicePixelRatio in Chrome.)

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

#98

Post by Narishma »

Multicomp wrote: post #91
approxim8ion wrote: post #13

Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility. I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.

Big kudos to the author for not getting sucked into the Electron Maelstrom. I find it so interesting that fancy MVU style Elm web UI event loops etc. all just reinvent the message loop that Windows has used since Win95. My PDF journey went from Adobe to Foxit to Firefox to SumatraPDF to Okular. I chose Okular over SumatraPDF because it does form fills and saves said form fill data to a new PDF. (Sumatra may do form f…

> the message loop that Windows has used since Win95

I'm pretty sure Windows had a message loop since the very first version.

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

#99

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

dataflow wrote: post #96
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see comments like this sometimes and wonder if people are born with super eyes or something and I missed out. I only notice the difference between the various HD standards and standard def if they're put right next to each other, don't even bother owning a monitor with >1920x1080, etc.

I promise you it's just as baffling to me that some people don't notice it! It seems clear as day to me and I don't even have great eyesight. Maybe it's something like font kerning where it's hard to notice but also hard to un-notice? Here's an example, can you not see the difference in sharpness clearly? - Sumatra (grayscale): https://i.imgur.com/wOP8hdX.png - Acrobat (subpixel): https://i.imgur.com/YXRy1WJ.png (NOT…

If I flip between them I can see a difference, yes, but it doesn't exactly make my eyes bleed. Opened up a random PDF in Sumatra without something to compare it to and, now having seen it, still nothing jumps out. Then again, I grew up with bitmapped fonts in 320x200 on a CRT.

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

#100

Post by radmuzom »

approxim8ion wrote: post #13

Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility. I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.

Agreed. And it's written in the native Win32 API. I personally find native Win32 apps much more usable with better UI/UX than most "modern" frameworks.
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