Support for Windows 95, 98 and ME has since been removed. Īs it was first designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows, Sumatra initially had some incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows.
The source code is provided with support for Microsoft Visual Studio. The source code is developed in two programming languages, mostly in C++, with some components in C.
Sumatra PDF is written mainly by two contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format. Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method to synchronize TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX. Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations.
Since version 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have been supported. This resulted in very large spool files and slow printing. Through version 1.1, printing was achieved by rasterizing each PDF page to a bitmap.
Other open-source readers like Okular and Evince make this optional, and Debian patches software to remove these restrictions, in accord with its principles of interoperability and re-use. Kowalczyk stated "I decided that will honor PDF creator's wishes". The PDF format's use restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6, preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts, a form of Digital Rights Management. In January, 2017, the latest version of SumatraPDF, 3.1.2, had a single 6.1 Mb executable file in comparison, Adobe Reader XI used 320 MB of disk space. In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a 1.21 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB.
Īs is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra uses little disk space. This classifies it as a portable application to read PDF, XPS, DjVu, CHM, eBooks (ePub and Mobi) and Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) formats. Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive, needing no installation. For rendering PDFs, it uses the MuPDF library. Apart from the junk it leaves on your computer hard drive, Sumatra is wonderful.Sumatra has a minimalist design, with its simplicity attained at the cost of extensive features. What it says, it can do and that’s exactly what it does without any form of problems whatsoever. We don’t like junk being left back after an uninstall, and we sure believe you feel the same way. The only problem users might have with Sumatra PDF is the folder left behind after the program is removed. Putting it on a USB worked really well - we tested it across several different computers with different operating systems and found it to work as intended. The software accomplishes this by being very small in size and portable. Probably the best thing about Sumatra PDF is the ability to put it on a USB drive to carry around.
The option to view PDFs in full screen and rotate pages make Sumatra PDF the defacto PDF reader for doing nothing else but reading PDF documents. With the built in Search Box, users can locate text within a PDF document with relative ease. Basic features like zooming in and out, book views, select single page, and facing page are all present, so the program is not too simple to the point where it is unusable. Sumatra PDF reader works well in this respect, because it lacks the advance features compared to the popular Adobe Reader but is very fast. Reading PDF files is a common task that is done on a daily basis by thousands of computer users, so having the right tool is very important. There are no confusing features, nothing here that would have the user straying too far from the simple goal of reading PDF documents.
Sumatra PDF is for the sole purpose of reading PDF files, and nothing else. It doesn’t have all the extra features found in Adobe Reader to slow it down, and that is the reason why Sumatra hits the right spot as many users who have PDF readers only use them to read PDF files and nothing else.
Sometimes less can be considered as more such is the case with Sumatra PDF reader.