Developer(s)
Krzysztof Kowalczyk
Initial release
June 1, 2006; 6 years ago
Stable release
2.2 / December 24, 2012; 14 days ago
Written in
C++
Operating system
Microsoft Windows
Available in
Multilingual
Type
PDF reader
License
GNU General Public License v3
Website
blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
SumatraPDF, also known as Sumatra, is a free and open source PDFreader. The program also opens DjVu, EPUB, XPS, CHM, CBZ and CBRand MOBI files. It is written by Krzysztof Kowalczyk.[1]
Contents
[hide]
1 Features
2 Development
3 History
4 Name and artwork
5 Critical reception
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
[edit]Features
Sumatra has a minimalistic design, with its simplicity attained at the expense of extensive features. For rendering PDFs it uses the MuPDFlibrary.
Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one single file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive.[2]This classifies it as a portable application.[1] As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space.[1] It has a 4.2 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader's 36.1 MB.[3] Install size is 8.2 MB, whereas Adobe Reader requires 320 MB of available disk space.[4]
When re-opening a document, the rotation, zoom, window size, page, etc. are remembered from the last time that document was opened, making it behave more like an e-book reader than other PDF viewers.[citation needed]
Sumatra does not lock the PDF file. Without closing the PDF file, a user can save over the PDF and then press the R key to refresh the PDF document. For example, a PDFTeX user could find this feature useful when, after recompiling the altered TeX source code, he/she could simply press 'R' and view the altered document.[citation needed]
The PDF format's usage restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6,[5] preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts. Kowalczyk stated "I decided that [Sumatra] will honor PDF creator's wishes".[6][7]
Up to Sumatra 1.1, printing was achieved by transforming each PDF page into a bitmap image. This resulted in very large spool files and potentially slow printing.[8][9]
Since Sumatra 0.9.1 hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents are also supported.[5]
Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations.[10]
Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method for synchronizing TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format.
[edit]Development
As it was initially designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows, Sumatra has some incompatibility issues with earlier versions of Windows. Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has since been dropped completely.[11]
Kowalczyk has not released a 64-bit version of Sumatra, indicating that while it might offer slightly more speed and more memory available it would greatly add to user confusion and that the benefits do not outweigh the potential costs.[12]
The source code can be downloaded either via its Subversion development repository or as a tarball.[13][14]
The Sumatra source code is hosted on Google Code and because of US export legal restrictions is thus not available "in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria."[15][16]
[edit]History
The first version of Sumatra PDF, designated version 0.1, was based on Xpdf 0.2 and was released on 1 June 2006. It switched toPoppler from version 0.2. In version 0.4 it changed to MuPDF because of speed improvement[17] and better support for the Windows platform, since Poppler decided to focus on integration with Unix platforms[citation needed]. Poppler remained as alternative engine, and from version 0.6 it was automatically used to render pages that MuPDF failed to load. Poppler was removed in version 0.9, released on 10 August 2008.
Version 1.0 was released on 17 November 2009 after more than three years of cumulative development, and version 2.0 was released on 2 April 2012, over two years after the release of version 1.0.[5]
The first unofficial translations were released in 2007 by Lars Wohlfahrt[18] before Sumatra PDF got official multi-language support.
[edit]Name and artwork
Early Logo
The author has indicated that the choice of the name “Sumatra” is not a tribute to the Sumatra island or coffee, stating that there is no particular reasoning behind the name.[19]
The graphics design of Sumatra is a tribute to the cover of the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.[20]
[edit]Critical reception
Sumatra has attracted acclaim for its speed and simplicity,[21] its keyboard shortcuts and its open sourcedevelopment.[20] The Free Software Foundation Europe recommends Sumatra PDF.[22]
[edit]See also
List of PDF software
List of portable software
