SumatraPDF, also known as Sumatra, is an open source PDF reader for Microsoft
Windows. The program also opens Open XML Paper Specification, DjVu, EPUB, XPS,
FB2, CHM, CB7 CBR CBT CBZ, MOBI and PRC files. It is written primarily by two
contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli.
Features Sumatra has a minimalistic design, with
its simplicity attained at the expense of extensive features. For rendering
PDFs it uses the MuPDF library. 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, requiring no installation. This
classifies it as a portable application. As is characteristic of many portable
applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space. In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a
1.21 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB. The installed size
is 8.2 MB, whereas Adobe Reader XI requires 320 MB of available disk space.
The PDF format's usage 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. Kowalczyk stated "I decided
that [Sumatra] will honor PDF creator's wishes". Other open source readers like
Okular and Evince make this optional, and Debian patches software to remove
these restrictions, in accordance with the open source principles of
interoperability and reuse. 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.
Since Sumatra 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have also been
supported. Sumatra is multilingual, with 69
community-contributed translations. 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. Development
SumatraPDF is written in the C++ programming language and the source code
is provided with support for Microsoft Visual Studio.
As it was first designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows,
Sumatra initially had some incompatibility issues with earlier
versions of Windows. Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has since been dropped
completely. Kowalczyk has not released a 64-bit
version of Sumatra, indicating that while it might offer slightly more speed
and more memory available, he believes it would greatly add to user confusion
and that the benefits would not outweigh the potential costs. However, some users
have requested 64-bit builds of Sumatra and other developers have compiled
unofficial 64-bit builds of Sumatra which load documents faster than the
32-bit builds. However, the official builds' developer has requested that
unofficial builds not bear the 'Sumatra' name.
The source code can be downloaded either via its Subversion development
repository or as a tarball. 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."
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 to Poppler from version 0.2. In version 0.4 it changed
to MuPDF because of speed improvement and better support for the Windows
platform. Poppler remained as alternative engine for a while, and from
version 0.6 to 0.8 it was automatically used to render pages that MuPDF failed
to load. Poppler was removed in version 0.9, released on 10 August 2008.
In July 2009 Sumatra PDF changed its license from GPLv2 to GPLv3 to match the
same license change on MuPDF. 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.
The first unofficial translations were released in 2007 by Lars Wohlfahrt
before Sumatra PDF got official multi-language support.
Name and artwork 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.
The graphics design of Sumatra is a tribute to the cover of the Watchmen
graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Critical reception Sumatra has attracted acclaim for its
speed and simplicity, for being portable, its keyboard shortcuts and its
open source development. At one time the Free Software Foundation
Europe recommended Sumatra PDF, but removed its recommendation in February
2014, due to the presence of the non-freely licensed unrar code in
Sumatra. Free Software Foundation Europe representative Heiki Ojasild explained,
"while they continue to make use of the non-free library, SumatraPDF cannot be
recognised as Free Software". Unrar was eventually replaced with a free
alternative in version 3.0, making it 100% free software.
See also List of PDF software
List of portable software References
External links Official website
SumatraPDF at Google Code